They take a step back as she turns. They are nervous of her now, as they should be. They have seen what she is capable of. She raises her upper lip exposing her teeth, snarls and lurches towards them, arms outstretched, fingers curled into claws. It is only a feint, but it sends them hightailing across the floor, squealing on all fours into the corner.
Simon has scarpered too. She thinks of him retreating into a hole. It is good that they are all terrified.
It is eight o’clock by the hall clock. Evening again – she has been held captive for two days. One period of twenty-four hours in the cellar and one buckled to the table.
Now it is time to leave.
Evie checks herself in the mirror, not out of vanity but self-preservation. The gel in her forehead has swollen up, a protective reaction resulting from her initial fall. Her wrists and ankles are scraped nearly through. Her body is frailer than she cares to admit – in this respect much like poor cursed Evelyn.
She is still wearing only her underwear – now stiff with gel and oil, emitted via her openings. Going upstairs to the bathroom, she cleans herself with a flannel and, rummaging again in Maplin’s sister’s room, finds a fresh vest and briefs. Over these, she dresses in a nanoflec sweater and trousers, and ankle boots she discovers under the bed.
She examines her damaged elbow and, returning downstairs, rummages through the kitchen drawers for something she can use to repair it. She finds a bicycle puncture kit in a rusty tin and applies glue and a black patch to her skin. She tentatively flexes the joint to test that it will hold, and slides down her sleeve.
In the hall, she takes her coat from the rack and finding the blonde wig in the pocket, pulls it over her messed hair.
Evie draws breath and examines herself in the mirror a second time – this time seeing someone new.
The fringe falls to her brow and conceals the bruising. As she moves her head to examine her new appearance, the bob floats across her cheeks.
Who is this person? What more is she capable of? she wonders. For the first time in her life, Evie doesn’t recognise herself. She is unusual, captivating even to a small degree, and, all-importantly, no longer a replication of a dead woman. In her forty-one years’ closeted existence with Matthew she ate only from The Tree of Life but during her few days with Maplin she has eaten now also from The Tree of Knowledge.
It is then that she starts to cry. The first tears she has been able to shed in years make their way out, flushing through a gritty residue of crystals to cake her lashes. She wipes at them, scratching her puffed-up cheeks. The relief is overwhelming. She oozes a flood of pent-up hurt. She is blind from it, collapsed against the wall. Decades of frustration and short, sharp recent grief sob their way out. She cries for Matthew, for Daniels and even for sad, clever Evelyn, taken from this life so young. She cries for the ill-formed mannequins imprisoned upstairs. And she cries copiously for her poor recently tortured self, for the thrill of life that she has been deprived of, and which she is only now sampling, belatedly, through a blur of pain and sorrow.
PART 4
The Dolls’ House
25
Evie limps towards the town. She creeps through a derelict shopping centre, its dark malls strewn with shattered glass and the carcasses of broken shopping trolleys. Her hips give her pain but her motor functions are once again aligned. She fell over on the pavement outside Maplin’s house, left and right legs reversing operation and then switching back, but the problem has not repeated itself and she has maintained her balance since. The rattle in her chest has subsided too, almost too faint now for even her to hear. But if the glass of her gyroscope is cracked, even a hairline, there will be nothing she can do.
She keeps to the shadows, crossing the street to avoid the doorways of pubs wafting a mashy, hoppy stink, such as which Daniels occasionally brought back to the apartment, when he’d sit at the table, reciting old exploits, lush with bravado as if they’d just transpired. Pretending to have had an amusing evening, when it was obvious he’d been sad and alone and would have done better spending it with her. Collapsing eventually, head on hands, in a beery coma.
They were nights she’d avoided the kitchen.
Once he’d brought back a woman – abundant fake hair wound into a crown with a sunset glow radiating from her skin – as unsteady on her feet as himself. After making herself loudly at home she’d bullied him into cooking her a feast, before growing insanely violent, throwing around pans and breaking crockery.
Evie had never seen him so contrite as on the morning after, scrubbing the kitchen floor on his knees. It was a wonder he wasn’t fired.
Crossing the low-lying marshy ground by the river, she is beseeched by the destitute. One calls to her in a forlorn tone from a hovel beside the path. She can’t see his face, just the swing of a plastic flap. ‘Sweet lady, have pity on a poor fella down on his luck,’ but when she veers sharply across the gravel, continues: ‘Too toity eh? What yur thinkin? Thet yur gort sugar on yor kont?’
Fires glow under the trees, illuminating a smoky roofline of plastiboard shacks. Between are deep excavations. Rotting cavities. The soil and stone thrown up in dunes. The ground scored with a front line of communicating trenches, brimming with inky winter flood.
Jittery from the attention from the catcalls and pursuing eyes, she is relieved when she is clear of the encampment. The aftermath of the torture, which briefly emboldened her to exact vengeance, has left her apprehensive of strangers. Her physical vulnerability has been spot-lit but so has an inherent bravery – a trait she has been alarmed to discover.
Reaching the river, Evie breathes in the moist air. Circumventing a ramp piled with the shells of rotting punts, she follows the water’s edge, feet slipping on the icy grass.
Around the river bend, the clock on the tower of John’s College, boxed in by housing pens in ripple-concrete and alu-clad, strikes ten.
Approaching the Hawking Museum, Evie keeps out of the light, crossing the dark lawn under the bare limbs of a weeping willow.
Reaching the building, she skirts around it, ducking beneath a pole barrier spanning an access road. She silently passes behind a pair of employees smoking in their nanoflec boiler-suit uniforms and totters down a steep concrete ramp for service vehicles into an underground delivery bay.
Here, her attention is drawn by a whirring and banging coming from behind a garbage bin. An automatic door is attempting to close, the edge striking an empty drink container wedged in the frame, and springing back.
Taking advantage, she steps through into the building, entering a concrete well, and ascends via steel stairs. A camera overhead twists to record her as she climbs.
She comes out on the second floor and crosses the echoey screed on tiptoe, catching a view of herself in the wall of David’s enclosure. Her head, startlingly pale, floats in the blackness. The clouded evening sky blocks out the glass panels of the atrium overhead and the only illumination is from the up-glimmer of the electric-blue LEDs drilled into the slippery floor.
She approaches cautiously.
At twelve feet high, the wall is more than twice her height. She stares into the gloom beyond, attempting to locate David.
‘You came.’ The voice is more refined than she’d have expected, but also louder and more authoritative and in that way reminds her of the absent Simon. She is not sure where it came from.
This is like making a night visit to the lion cage, only to find the gate open and the beasts circling. She strains her hearing and picks up the porous notes of David’s breath.