‘But you want it to.’
He shakes his head.
I say it then. The word that’s fluttered inside me for years. I thought I was brave when I said ‘consent’ and ‘rape’ but now, as it darts to the tip of my tongue, I understand they’re a kindness compared to this. I was saving him from it. Or myself. ‘You’re a paedophile.’
‘What?’ The old man vanishes. In his place is something wild – flashing eyes, bared teeth.
‘A paedophile.’
For a second, he is still, just his right hand convulses. Then, his control goes. He flies at me, covering the distance of the stairs. The force of him, the speed, brings a sudden blank fear – I jump out of my chair, it topples over. ‘Don’t you call me that. Ever!’ His eyes bore into me as he pulls his arm back and swings the bottle against the cellar door. The glass shatters.
I stumble, reaching clumsily for anything to steady me – the edge of the countertop, the cool brick of the wall – and in that moment, I realise how terrified I am, a primal fear of his hands across my throat, his fist on my face, and I am astounded that I was ever confused about his intentions towards me when now, they are so appallingly clear. This man wants to hurt me.
But he can’t.
Because he was right about the cellar door. The safety glass, though shattered, is reinforced. Not a single piece falls.
I peel my fingers off the island. Blood is still rushing round my head, my heart is hammering but I force myself to look at him. His eyes on me blaze; once, I wouldn’t have been able to bear that. But once, I wanted to be a thing in his jar. I walk slowly over to the shattered cellar door. Tap it with my toe. Nothing happens.
‘Let me out,’ he whispers. ‘You let me out.’
I pick up the chair. Sit back down.
He drops the neck of the bottle; it smashes at his feet and then he smacks his palms against the door, over and over.
I fix my eyes on a single crack until the blur of movement stops.
He is slumped on the steps, his face in his hands. ‘What do you want from me?’
‘Everything.’ I get off the dining chair, sit cross-legged above him. We are two people whispering in the dark, all that love and damage between us. ‘Tell me,’ I say very gently, ‘how did it start?’
He puts his hand over his mouth.
‘Please.’
He pauses fractionally; this secret could be another card to play. But then he wipes his eyes, gives me an odd, resigned smile and I know he’s going to tell me. There’s no one else. It must be such a relief. To tell the truth for once. ‘It started with Lolly.’
The name cuts me in two.
‘My father was a soldier, he was posted to a base in the Philippines. It was immense, thousands of hectares reaching over the Sierra Madre mountains, all the way to the Pacific. It was so vast, it had its own forest.’ He laughs at the memory. ‘Every few months, these illegal loggers would come with bulldozers andchainsaws and cart off truckfuls of timber. It caused a scandal. A military base, invaded by logging companies.’
His voice takes me back to the stories he’d tell me in his lab. I want to close my eyes.
‘My dad wasn’t that interested in me, I wasn’t his kind of boy, didn’t want to play football or wrestle, all I wanted to do was fill up jars from the forest with huge, prickly stick insects, giant crab spiders, yellow crazy ants, vicious little biters, once, they escaped through a crack in the glass and my dad went ballistic.’ He chuckles. ‘The forest was also where I first started catching butterflies – Peacock Swallowtails, Green Dragontails, Glassy Tigers, I didn’t know what they were at the time, or how to preserve them. She taught me.’
A forest unzips in my mind, I am choking on wings and petals.
‘She was a tiny slip of a thing, twelve, thirteen, I felt enormous next to her, though I was the same age. She was an incredible catcher. I dream about her sometimes, climbing trees, waiting for the perfect moment to squeeze their thorax, kill them instantly . . .’
Ruthless. Practical. All those things I’d admired about him.
‘Her family were tenant farmers, she’d string the butterflies up, sell them for nothing to help out.’ He laughs. ‘They weren’t even what she was looking for. She was searching for tiny orange flowers. Later, when I looked into it, I was almost certain she was looking for these miniature orange orchids, endemic to that area, extraordinarily rare.’
He gave me a book on orchids. He was always trying to make me into her.
‘She said, “Lola” all the time, a name I hadn’t heard before, so I called her an English word I knew, something that was closeenough, “Lolly.” Years later, I found out “Lola” means “grandmother” in Tagalog. She’d been talking about her grandmother, not herself. I never knew.’
The name he gave her, the name he gave me, nothing more than a mistranslation.