My voice doesn’t sound like my own. I sound stretched thin, exhausted. I’m getting frustrated with all these people standing and watching and doing fucking nothing. Can’t they see she’s dying?
“Call an ambulance! Someone, call an ambulance!”
I switch and turn on the crowd behind me, hands outstretched toward them. Most of them look away. The ones who don’t are bug-eyed with terror. I don’t blame them. I think Tuff Shit is laughing but then I realize he isn’t laughing, of course he isn’t. He’s crying. I hear a long ripping sound and see Vicky is tearing into the neck of her T-shirt so violently she has pulled it apart. I glimpse the strap of her bra underneath, the flash of a gold St. Christopher necklace. Her hands circle her neck as if she is trying to choke herself, eyes seeking me out helplessly. No sound comes out of her mouth. Such dark eyes she has, like pools of ink.Poor Vicky,I think as I use my fingers to lever open her stiff jaw, trying to get a look inside. By now people are drifting away. They didn’t want a part of this and I don’t blame them. Vicky’s throat is bulging like something is stuck in there, her tongue a fat wet slab that reminds me of that haunch wrapped in plastic on the counter. I think of Alice saying“the witch’s tongue is black”and I feel sick and cold all over. Vicky’s whole face is dark now, almost purple. Next time I look at her, she doesn’t see me. Her eyes are gone, gone all the way back into her head.
EIGHTEEN
The next morning I wake to bright sunlight, shrill as a scream. It’s late by my watch, just gone eleven. I’ve slept for nearly twelve hours. Downstairs the radio is playing and I can hear the clatter of cutlery. I take my contraceptive pill in the bathroom with a cupped handful of water, feeling tension knot my shoulders. I’m still shaken by what happened yesterday. The way Vicky fell, as if she’d been pushed by invisible hands right off that boy’s shoulders. I can’t get the images out of my mind—they rattle past like a slideshow: the wasp crawling over Alice’s fingers, the eggshell nestled in the curls of Vicky’s hair, the way Tuff Shit’s mouth curved down into a horrified, quivering rictus. Something about the whole thing feels volatile, like a stoked flame. Today though, the street outside is empty. No incense burning, no placards declaringGIVE THE DEAD THY TONGUE, no small huddle of afflicted-looking people.It’s a relief. I hope they stay away. Alice went silently to bed the previous evening even as the blue lights of the emergency vehicles had pulsed outside, the sickle moon bone-white in the sky. When I tapped on her bedroom door, Dictaphone in hand, she called out for me to leave her alone.
I open the front door gingerly and peer out into the white heat of late morning. The little shrine which had been building is cleared away but crusts of egg are still spattered across the downstairs windows, drying to a paste. In the kitchen, behind the closed door, I can hear a radio softly playing. Maybe it’s Sam, sitting with his cigarette burning the insides of his fingers yellow, tea stewing in the pot. I hope it is. I could do with someone to talk to. My mood lifts a little.
At first, I’m notsure what I’m looking at on the kitchen table. There are small mounds of pale flesh threaded with veins, slit open like crimson petals, deepening to purple. The newspaper beneath them is stained pink with blood.
“Rabbits,” Paul says, without looking up at me. He’s sharpening knives on the back step the same way I used to see my grandfather do, sweeping the blade along the stone. “I’ve skinned them and taken off the legs. The fur comes off clean, like peeling a banana.”
He stands and looks at me with his narrow, serious eyes. He is shirtless, the hair on his chest soft and dark like a pelt. He looks tired, and I wonder if he has just finished his shift. If he has, it looks as though he has brought his work home with him. I burp queasily.
“Where is everyone?”
“Lisa’s taken the little ones to her parents’. We thought it bestto get them away for a while. Sam’s up at the Green trying to find a phone box that hasn’t been pissed in, I should think. He’s been trying to call the hospital.”
“About Vicky?”
“You know, we used to have her here for tea not so long ago? Vicky was a sweet kid, always polite. Please and thank you and she called us Mister and Missus Webber no matter how many times me and Lisa told her to just use our names. Her and Alice were born on the same ward just two days apart. Some girls just get the Devil in ’em.”
“What about Alice? Is she okay?”
“You tell me. You’re the expert.” He smiles tightly.
“I haven’t been here long enough to form an opinion, Paul.”
He snorts.
“You been here long enough to make a guess?”
I stare at him over the table, the smell of blood thick in the air. His voice sounds as if it is taunting me, somehow.
“Uh, okay, then. In my opinion I see a level of emotional disconnect in Alice. Certainly there’s a distorted perception of reality.” I think of the way Alice looked at Vicky the previous day, that bloodless smile. “I’d like to assess her properly though, before I say any more.”
“Can you give that to me in English?” He’s smiling but it’s taut and mean. He thinks I’m patronizing him.
“I mean she’s delusional.”
“Ah. The witch.”
A beat.
“That’s part of it, yes.”
“What’s the other part?”
I shift uncomfortably.
“Some of the symptoms I’m seeing in Alice—the withdrawal,the intrusive thoughts, even the hallucinations—can be traced to a trauma in childhood. Can you think of anything that may have affected her, Paul?”
He looks at me a long time, a drop of blood swelling and fattening on the knife tip. I watch it sway pendulously, hypnotized.
“What are you trying to say, Mina? That I can’t protect my own kids?”