Nicola Griffith (28 page)

I think she saw that, and I think it frightened her even more. I wanted to explain to her that I wouldn’t hurt her, that I wasn’t like everyone else she knew, but I didn’t know what to say—and I wasn’t sure if it was true.

She saw my indecision. “Poor little rich girl!”

“No.” I was too tired for this. I finished my drink and stood up. “Not anymore. I work for my living. I work hard. I do a good job. It means something.”

“Shoveling shit means something?”

“What does
your
job mean?” I was suddenly blazingly angry: with her, with the world that had shaped her, at myself and all the things I had done or neglected to do. “What does it mean to you that people pay to use you like a disposable tissue? Does the money make you feel good, worthwhile, even when you can’t move because of the pain and you’re all alone because you don’t have any friends? Does it make you feel good that you might have died if this poor little rich girl hadn’t decided to take pity on you? Does it make you feel good when you wake up in the morning hating yourself because of the things you did to make a quick hundred? Does it?”

I have never seen a snake in the second before it strikes, but I think I know how it would look. It would move its head back a fraction of an inch, it would close its nictitating membranes partway, and the sunlight would slide across hard gray fangs, dry as ancient bone. And then its expression would go blank as all the muscles but those it would use to strike, to drive the venom home into soft mammalian tissue, relaxed.

But then Spanner just picked up her drink, tossed it back, and smiled.

TWENTY-TWO

Lore is eighteen. It is her birthday, or it might be. She is sitting in a tent erected inside some kind of warehouse, or maybe it’s a barn. The smells are certainly rural rather than urban: wine and garlic and oil, the occasional hint of grass too long in the sun. The Mediterranean, perhaps, or the South of France. She wonders how they got her here from the resort; she remembers nothing after the two men drugging her in the room.

She has been inside the tent for nearly three weeks, as far as she can tell. They keep her sedated. To begin with, they put it in her food, but because she does not always eat everything, they keep getting the dose wrong. One time, they gave her so much that she slept for over two days, or so they said. Now, though, her system is so saturated that they simply hand her a pill and stand over her while she puts it meekly in her mouth and swallows. But she thinks it is probably her birthday.

The tent is empty but for a sleeping bag and a bucket. The bucket is emptied every twelve hours. Sometimes the tent stinks. She is humiliated. She is kept naked though not, she is sure, through prurience. There are two men; one, the taller, wears clothes that always seem to smell of something frying, like fish; the other, shorter than Lore, moves fast and slightly sideways, like a crab. When they bring her food trays or empty her bucket or hand her the pills, both wear gloves, and hoods like ski masks. She has no idea what they look like, of their race or age, but she feels she could tell them apart even without the height discrepancy. The tall one, whom she thinks of as Fishface, seems nice. He always averts his head when he enters, almost as though he is ashamed of what he is doing. The other one, though, Crablegs—she does not like him. He is the one who talks, the one who tells her to eat her pills or she will have to be tied up; the one who wakes her up and shouts at her that her family is refusing to pay the ransom. It was Crablegs who brought in an old folding chair and a camera one time, along with a copy of a news flimsy.

“Sit on the chair,” he said, “and hold this in front of you, so they can see the date.”

Who?
she wondered, but could not quite make her mouth shape the words.

He fiddled with the camera and brilliant light flooded the tent. “Talk. Tell them you’re scared for your life.”

She was not scared. The drugs made everything seem distant and somehow irrelevant. Lore just sat there, blinking. “Light’s too bright,” she slurred.

“You don’t like it?” He moved closer, shone it directly in her eyes.

She tried to hold up her hand to shield her face, but her fingers felt like bunches of sausages, and the flimsy got in the way.

“In front of you, I said. So they can see the date. So they know we haven’t killed you yet.”

Yet. She thought about that. She should be scared, but all she could feel was the smooth wood under her buttocks and the slick flimsy against her stomach.
Naked,
she thought,
naked and vulnerable.

“Talk,” Crablegs ordered, and turned up the light.

She just wanted the light to go away, to go back to her cotton-wool dreams. She whimpered.

“That’s it, that’s better.” He filmed for a moment, then adjusted something near the microphone. “Now, tell them how much you want to get out of here.”

She wanted the light to stop. She wanted to lie down and sleep. “Please,” she said. A tear slid slowly down beside her nose, under the curve of her cheekbone, across the corner of her mouth and dripped off her jaw. “Please,” she said again. “Please. . .”

“Tell them.”

“I want to go home.” It didn’t matter that she slurred, it didn’t matter that after all she had been through to be an adult in the eyes of her parents they would see her like this: naked, vulnerable, weeping. “I want to go home. Please. . .”

He turned off the light. “You can stop now.”

But Lore couldn’t stop. Her weeping turned to wet heaving sobs, to hiccoughs.

“Oh, shut up. And get off the chair.”

She slid to the floor, clutched at his trouser leg.

“Get
off
me. Jesus.” He wiped at the slime on his leg. “Jesus.” He threw something at her—a handkerchief. “Clean yourself up.”

He left, carrying the chair and camera, still wiping at his trouser leg.

Her sobs steadied. She cried in a low monotone for hours and hours, until they gave her more drugs, and she slept.

But today is her birthday, at least it might be. Today, she can think a little.

The day began unpleasantly, when the pill she was handed with breakfast half dissolved in her mouth before she could swallow it. Afterward, when Fishface left, she spat clots of soggy white power into her hand, and wiped her hand on the floor. She ate nearly all the food on her tray in an effort to get rid of the taste on her tongue. Some time later she noticed that the leftovers on the plates were sausage, and croissant, and juice. Breakfast. It must be morning. And that was when she started to think, to try count the days, and realized it was her birthday.

Eighteen. She now owns her share of inherited stock in the family corporation. She is rich.

When Fishface brings her lunch tray, she is alert enough to slide the pill under her tongue and pretend to swallow. She can feel it dissolving and wonders how much will get into her bloodstream before she can spit it out.

Fishface’s hood moves slightly in what Lore interprets as a smile. She stares blankly at the floor, hoping he will not notice she is more alert than usual. She catches sight of the white smears on the floor and her heart jitters. She forces herself to look away, look at anything but the floor, and after a moment, he leaves. She waits, listens. Hears a door opening somewhere, then closing. She spits the pill into her hand. Where can she put it?

There is bread with the meal. She tears off a crust and pokes a hole in the dough, then hesitates. Maybe they give the scraps to a dog. They might notice if it fell asleep. She searches the floor of the tent, finds a tiny tear in the plastic. Underneath, she can feel the long, scratchy grain of old wood. She pushes her finger one way, then another, finds a crack between the planks. She squeezes the pill through the hole and into the crack.

By now her lunch, soup and bread, is cold. She looks at it and remembers: Stella is dead. For a moment, she wishes she had the pill back, wishes she could just drift here, not thinking, until her parents pay up and she can go home. Then she will find it is all a nightmare. She never went to the resort. Tok never called. Stella isn’t dead.

All of a sudden she is angry with Stella.
You have no right to make me grieve!
she thinks. Her situation is difficult enough without grief—she needs to be able to think, to plan, not to feel leaden like this, awash with memory. When she gets out of here, she will tell Stella exactly what . . .

But Stella is dead.

Grief is more terrible than she ever thought possible. It is as though there is a hole right through her. She shakes, her muscles spasm and ache. It’s hard to swallow because her throat feels too tight, and her heart jumps and skitters. She is sweating. And then she understands. It’s the drugs. Lack of drugs. She’s withdrawing.

Over the next few days she works out a way to taper off the sedatives. The sodden lumps she spits from her mouth aren’t easy to divide, and sometimes she takes too much, but after six days, she is back to nothing, and no longer shakes.

She makes more holes in the bottom of the tent and explores the floor, a few splintery inches a day. On the fourth day of exploration, she finds a six-inch nail. It is old, rusty black iron, and bent at one end, but it comforts her to hold it between the fingers of her left hand, let it poke forward when she makes a fist. While she has a weapon she is more than a helpless victim. She can think, she can plan. At night, before she falls asleep, she tucks the nail down by her feet inside the sleeping bag. In the morning, she holds it in her fist and smiles.

The nail becomes the center of her universe. Her fingers begin to smell of rust, but for Lore, it is the smell of hope.

TWENTY-THREE

I was still thinking about Spanner’s hard gray smile in the breakroom as the shift started draining their hot drinks, picking up masks, and standing, ready to get back to the last third of the night. The news was showing on the screen, but as I fastened my neck seal and strapped on waders, that dry-bone smile was superimposed on the changing pictures. The sound was off, but the female anchor was nodding at something the male anchor had said, her face composed in that caring expression they always affect when they talk about someone or some cause the listening public will want to take to their hearts.

I should not have said those things to Spanner. They should not have been spoken aloud. It was the kind of thing Spanner herself would have done, not me. Not Lore. And the snake would strike, sooner or later.

A close-up of the male anchor cut away to a second screen: a picture of a teenaged boy with the kind of feather cut that always looks so good on dusty black Asian hair. He seemed vaguely familiar. Perhaps it was the chair he was tied to.

My muscles went rigid, as though my hands were tied to my sides. My body seemed in the wrong place, the wrong position, as if I should be sitting down.

The picture on the screen changed from the boy to me, sitting on the same chair. My body felt confused, in three places at once: sitting in a tent, in bright light, weeping and slurring; naked and bleeding on the cobbles, bathing in the light of images of myself tied to a chair; standing clothed—uniformed, anyway—in a hot breakroom.

The bell signaling the end of the break rang, but I just stood there, stupid and still and alone, while the pictures of me played. Eventually, the screen cut to the male anchor speaking soundlessly, and then back to the sixteen-year-old boy. Then a man, old enough to be the boy’s father, hurrying down some steps on a narrow street, the kind found in the centers of some Asian cities, shielding his face from the sun and bright camera lights.

I could move again. I turned up the sound. “—tape was given to the net an hour ago. Although the family refused to comment, a spokeswoman for the Singapore police department tells us she suspects the Chen family have known about the kidnap of Lucas Chen for over a week.”

Cut to female anchor. “And this isn’t the only similarity to the van de Oest abduction over three years ago.” Another picture, this time of a young Frances Lorien. Solemn-faced, arrogant. I wondered when it had been taken. I didn’t remember it.

I turned the sound off, and sat down. I stood up again, quickly. Sitting made me feel vulnerable, made me remember the light, the camera.

Not again. Not all those pictures running, over and over.

I looked at the screen again. The boy wasn’t me, but the chair was the same, and the tent, the light. Everything. Probably the same kidnappers.
Kidnapper,
I told myself. Fishface was probably three years dead.

“Bird!” Magyar. Hard-eyed and cross. “Break finished more than—”

“I know. Five minutes ago.” I felt unreal. Suspended somewhere between
then
and
now.
Between
Frances Lorien
and
Bird.
“I’m Lore,” I whispered to myself. “I’m Lore.”

Magyar stepped closer. “What are you mumbling about?”

“You want to know who I am? Take a look. Up there. May as well look now as later. They’ll be playing it for days.” Poor Magyar, she didn’t understand. “What do you think—is it me?”

“What?”

I nodded at the screen. She glanced at it, then back at me, then, almost unwillingly, back at the screen. Her face began to change, muscles moving as her brain processed the information. I suppose it was a shock. She jerked her arm up and out to the volume switch.

“—with Oster van de Oest, live from Auckland.”
The fountain was buttery with summer sunshine. Oster, used to cameras, had made sure the sun was behind him so he wouldn’t squint.

“We empathize with the family of Lucas Chen. We know how we felt when Frances Lorien was taken. We know that somewhere, someone knows where she is. Even after three years. We’re prepared to offer two hundred and fifty thousand for information leading to the discovery of the whereabouts of our daughter.”

He looked different. Older. And so formal. He thought I was dead.

I turned the sound off. “It’s not Auckland, you know.” Magyar looked at me blankly. “The house. Ratnapida. The family has an agreement with the news services not to reveal where we live.” They were showing more pictures of me. Magyar was looking back and forth from me to the screen. “Not that easy to see at first, is it? But you’d have spotted it eventually. It’s there, if you think to look.”

She was turned away from me now, studying the bright pictures, but she watched me from the corner of her eye.

“That’s me. Frances Lorien van de Oest. The real me. Or it was.” I didn’t know who I was now. I had an eerie sense of multiplicity, of staring down at my reflection in the water and seeing three faces instead of one.

Magyar was very still, and her eyes looked odd. Slitty. Sunk back into their epicanthic folds. I knew I should be wary of her strange expression, but I felt oddly dispassionate. Unreal. The pictures on the screen kept moving, mute. The three reflections in my head rippled.
Who am I?
Magyar still didn’t say anything. She was clenching and unclenching her plasthene-gloved fists. Her mouth was a straight line.

“You aren’t supposed to be angry,” I said calmly, from a great distance.

“No? Tell me, Bird, how am I
supposed
to react?”

Like everyone else reacted to the van de Oest name: shock, awe, then a closing off as the person they were dealing with changed from
human
to
van de Oest.

“I don’t understand. Why are you angry?”

“Because I feel like a fool.” Her nostrils were white. She was breathing hard. In, out. In. Out. Abruptly, she jerked her arm around, looked at her watch. “We’ve already lost shift time. Time is money. Unless you’ve decided you’ve had enough of playing at poor little miss worker bee, I want you on-station in three minutes. And I’ll expect you to make up the time you’ve lost.”

Just like that. Dismissed. “But. . .”

“But what?” Hand on hip.

But I’m Frances Lorien van de Oest!
Didn’t she know what that meant? She couldn’t just
dismiss
me, as if I were anyone else . . .
But she had.
Which is what I wanted, wasn’t it—to be treated as a real person?

“We’re not done with this, Bird. Not nearly done. We’ll talk after the shift. After you’ve made up your time.”

She waited. I waited back, then realized she had the upper hand: I was the worker, she the supervisor. The fact that I had told her who I really was didn’t change that. I left the breakroom. As though my movement had disturbed the surface of a river, the three faces shivered and blurred together, indistinct.

I don’t remember walking to the troughs, but found myself there, trembling, looking at my face in the slick black water.

Who am I? What would I say if I opened my mouth?

We ordered loc, the hot chocolate liqueur. Magyar took a big gulp of steaming liquid and burned herself. She swore, called to the man behind the counter for some ice, then scowled at him when he shoved an ice bucket her way. Her eyebrows were very dark against her pale skin.

She put a cube in her mouth, crunched, sucked.

I said nothing. I did not even want to breathe too hard, in case the single blurred reflection in my head separated out again.

“So. We’re here to talk about the way you lied to me.”

I spoke carefully, uncertain of my voice. Of my accent. Of the language. Of my own tongue. “It’s hard.”

“Do it anyway.” Utterly unsympathetic.

“Tell me about your family.”

“Why? We’re here to talk about you, not me.”

“Do you have brothers? Or sisters?”

“Both.” She swallowed her ice and took another experimental sip of loc.

“I have—
had
—two sisters and a brother. But one is a half sister, Greta, my mother’s daughter, and she’s so much older than me she’s more like an aunt—”

“Is this relevant?”

“—and the other brother and sister are twins. Were twins. Stella killed herself.” Now she was listening. “In some ways I was like an only child. And my parents should have divorced fifteen years ago. I am used to hiding things that matter to me, keeping them close. It’s what I do. Who I am.”

“Tell me why the fuck I should care about that! You think that just because you can buy me and Hedon Road, probably the whole city, a hundred times over I’ll nod and say, Fine? Just like that? Without even an explanation of why you’ve been hiding, lying to me? Lying to everyone.”

There was no way to deal with her anger. I ignored it. “This job, Hedon Road, isn’t a game to me. I need it. I have less money than you do.”
Not true, not true. What about the thirty thousand?
The faces shimmered, each with their own secrets.

The muscles in her jaw had relaxed a little, and her pupils were returning to normal.

“I was kidnapped. You know that. When they, when I escaped, I couldn’t go back.” The rest stuck in my throat like small polished pebbles.

“Why? And why did you lie?”

I sat there, mute.

“I feel like such a fool. Do you have any idea how
used
I feel? All that time I was ordering you around, telling you to bring me this readout or that, treating you like an apprentice. Making you work like that. All that time, you knew, you
knew
. . .” She swirled the remains of her loc around the glass. “You know something? You’ve made me feel ashamed of myself. Of how I bullied you. I don’t like that.”

“You didn’t bully me.”

She wasn’t listening. “But
why
? That’s what I don’t understand. You say you need the money, but why? Why aren’t you back with Mummy and Daddy—”

“Don’t.” Sharper than I intended. “Please, don’t call them that.”

“Fine. Your family, then. Why aren’t you with them, in your fancy house, or estate, or whatever?”

“Ratnapida.”

“What?”

“The house. It’s called Ratnapida.” Stella in the fountain. Oster. Then, later, Oster and Tok, standing side by side. Tok looking beaten.”Whatever. You could be in the sunshine, doing nothing. So why are you hiding? And what happened to the real Sal Bird?”

I think I killed someone,
I had told her. “I never met her. She died in an accident.” I waited for her to decide whether or not to believe me. I knew I looked calmer than I felt. Years of training at the dinner table.

She absorbed that, nodding. Still expressionless. “Go on.”

“The man I killed. . .” I swallowed.
The man I killed.
“It was one of the men who kidnapped me.” I told her about the tent, the drugs. About Crablegs and the camera. About finding the nail.

“This is hard. I haven’t thought about it. It was . . . So when they took me outside, after they’d told me my family hadn’t paid . . . I thought . . . it just. . .” Another swallow. I looked down at my hand on the bar. This was not something I wanted to think about. I stared at my fingertips, the way the skin curled pinkly around the nails. She put her hands on mine, warm and dry. I still couldn’t look up.
Try,
that hand said. “I had the nail hidden in my fist. When we got outside I hit him in the neck.”

She lifted her hand from mine and picked up her drink. “Was he dead?”

“The other one, Crablegs, he said I’d killed him. “But. . .” But of course Crablegs would want me to think that. Keep me confused, docile. “I don’t know. I just assumed.”

“Then that’s the first thing we do tomorrow.”

“We?”

She just looked at me, indecipherable.

I felt strange. “I need another drink.”

We were quiet while the drinks arrived.

“When did it happen, the kidnap?”

“September. Three years ago.” Crisp clean air like the scent of apples. The cobbles, blood. Only he might not be dead after all. And Magyar had said
we.
“September. Right. So we’ll look at all the murder reports from three—”

But I wasn’t listening. I might not have killed him after all. “Do you have any idea what this means to me?” I said suddenly.

Her voice was soft. “Why don’t you tell me?”

I put my hand on hers, the one still wrapped around her glass. Neither of us said anything. We both pretended our hands weren’t warm and soft together, palm to back, finger on finger, the hair of her forearm touching the underside of my wrist.

“I want to tell you something. About my family. Why Stella killed herself. No one else knows.” Not even Spanner.
Do you know what I’m entrusting to you?
I think she did. “My father loved me. That’s what I thought. But then I found out my sister Stella had been . . .” I couldn’t say it. It was as though there were a clothespin crimping that part of my mind together. I had to talk about it. “I had bad dreams about a monster. My older sister, Greta—she was already grown by the time my mother married my . . . Anyway, she understood what was really happening. She gave me a lock for my door, so. . .”
the monster
“my. . .”
the monster
“so
Oster
couldn’t come into my bedroom when I was alone. Stella went into therapy. Tok said she was getting better, but then she killed herself. And I hadn’t known. Anything. All that time, he was doing that to her. Had been. And then when she got older, when she wasn’t a helpless child anymore, he tried it on me. But Greta knew.” Greta, always gray and stooped, hesitant as though something was about to come around the corner and get her. “I think it had happened to her, too. What I can’t understand. . .” The air in the bar seemed too thick all of a sudden, the oxygen all used up. I wanted to go belly to the ground, where it was safer, where it was easier to breathe. “What I can’t understand is why no one told me. Tok knew. Stella knew. Greta knew. I didn’t. I should have guessed. There were all these clues. He even . . . He even took me for a walk and asked me what I knew, what I had been told.”

What did Stella say?
he had asked.