“What about Lisa?”
“Tomorrow. The kids will stay with their grandparents a bit longer. Just till all this is over, like.”
“I might sleep in here tonight. In Tamsin’s bed. Keep an eye on Alice.”
Paul frowns.
“You still think she’s delusional.”
“What did you mean when you said ‘this town is built on witches’ bones,’ Paul?”
I see his brief hesitation, as if pulled up short. He grunts, flicking ash into the fireplace.
“You getting married soon, Mina, that right?”
I hesitate a fraction too long. Just thinking about it feels like shards of glass are being pushed into my chest but I don’t feel like admitting to Paul that actually no, my fiancé has almost certainly been cheating on me with his lab assistant, so I make an effort to keep my voice steady when I say, “Yes.”
“Heh. He’s some sort of scientist, isn’t he? Must be rich doing such an important job. Must make a lot of money. Own home, own car. All that’ll be yours one day, too.”
I frown.
“I suppose.”
“Then you’ll forgive me for saying that you don’t know what it’s like to be broke. To be so desperate for money that you dent tins in the supermarket so they’ll sell them to you cheap. To bring home the meat that no one else wants eating—offal and chitterlings and bones to make broth. Desperation makes you inventive, Mina. I just think it’s important you know that.”
I think of the rabbit corpses, skinned and gutted and glossy with blood.
“Every day in this family it feels like we’re sinking. I mean, look at this”—he indicates the wall, smeared with black sludge—“the house is falling apart. We’re putting food on the table but the kids are growing fast and I don’t know how much further we can make things stretch. Do you remember me talking about the Enfield poltergeist? All over the news it was, how them little girls were haunted.”
I have a vague memory of a photograph of a young girl catapulted into the air above her bed by what was described as an “unseen force.” I nod.
“It was serialised in all the papers at the time. What they called ‘supernatural events.’ There were photographers, television crews—it was a big thing. Reckon that family made a fortune off it.”
He sighs.
“When I called Sam atThe Herald,Alice had been ill, and although there were some things going on we couldn’t explain, Imight of made more of it than it was. Elaborated on a few things, maybe.”
“Because desperation makes you inventive?”
“I didn’t lie, Mina. I just wanted to catch Sam’s attention. That’s all. That stuff about her puking up the hair and pins, I got the idea from a movie. But everything else—her hearing voices, seeing things—that’s all real and now it’s gone too far. I’m scared for Alice. It’s superstitious, ’round here. You asked me about Banathel being built on witches’ bones—they used to drag them onto the green and cut their tongues right out of their heads so they couldn’t speak their spells no more. Riddance, it’s called. A lot of these women—girls, really, barely more than teenagers some of them—were left to bleed out like cattle. Think about it. All that blood over the years, soaking into the earth. Banathel’s foundations are rotted.”
“That’s horrible.”
He turns to look at me over his shoulder. I can just make out the curve of his stubbled cheek and the glint of one dark, suspicious eye.
“It’stradition,Mina. You can’t outlast it. Best you can do is outrun it.”
I wait for Samto return but by half past nine there’s still no sign of him. I eat cold pizza and gladly take Paul’s offer of a beer, sitting with the cold bottle clamped between my knees while I write in my little moleskin notebook. I need to find some order, and recording it this way helps me forget how Alice leaned toward me and hissed,“I know what you did, Meens,”in a rich, thick voice so unlike her own. I write down how she looked, with her head lowered and her eyes glaring at me through slotted lids. I writeabout how she said,“I hear her voice all the time now,”and then something occurs to me. I set down my pen and rub my temples. Paul is doing the washing up in cold, greasy water, a cigarette jutting from his mouth.
“Hey, Paul, do you have any batteries?”
“What size?”
“Uh, Walkman size.”
Paul grunts, wiping his hands dry on the front of his jeans.
“Gone dead, has it? I’m not surprised, the amount Alice listens to it. I said to Lisa that it’s cost us more in batteries than it did to buy the bloody thing. We ought to sell it, I told her, we’ll save ourselves a fortune, but she won’t hear of it. Said it’d be cruel. Tell you what, though, she won’t be laughing when we have to have them headphones surgically removed from Alice’s bloody head!” He laughs coarsely and nods toward the dresser behind me. “They’ll be some in those drawers. Bottom ones, not the top. Have a look. I’m off to watch the news. Apparently they pulled some local kid out the quarry this morning.”