“What are you doing?” Maria asks, watching as I unroll the socks and pick up the bar of soap I’d thrown at her brother on my first day here.
“Making a stryker.”
“Like the one you made for Danny?”
“Exactly.” I nod. “I’m putting soap in this one, but you can use anything, really. It’s the pivot that makes it effective.”
I demonstrate, dropping my hip and swinging the sock in a large, swooping arc.
Maria’s eyes widen. “Does it hurt?”
“I’ve never actually used one before, but it’s enough to knock someone unconscious if you do it hard enough, I guess.”
I move over to the mattress and settle onto it with my back against the wall. Maria draws in next to me, her small frame of barely any weight leaning against mine. The blankets are so cold they feel almost damp, but I pull them over us regardless and lether lay her head on my shoulder. I run my hand over the bristles growing on her scalp. She is trembling, a bag of bones covered in thin skin.
When she next speaks, her voice is very thin. “Will it kill us, Hazel?”
I don’t know the answer to that. My other sister has never killed before, but she has hurt plenty. I think the hurting is what she likes best of all. The meanness, the violence. How ugly it makes me, how brutal.
I squeeze Maria closer to me. “I’ll try and look after you, Maria, okay? I’ll keep you safe.”
“Like a mother?”
I nod. A mother. Andrew couldn’t have picked a worse person, I think to myself. Mothers are shelter and comfort, steadfast and selfless. It’s Cathy I think of when I think of a mother, not my own. Cathy, who had once described motherhood as like being the captain of a sinking boat in shark-infested waters. I used to watch her and Danny with awe, the games they played, the way they would laugh together, his hand reaching for hers with such certainty that she would always be there.
“You know what someone told me recently? That if you’re frightened, you should think of your happiest memory and try to hold on to it. What’s yours, Maria?”
She burrows deeper against me. “The blue rabbit.”
The wind whistles around the edges of the window.
“He was my best toy. He had a ribbon round his neck and a fluffy white tail that I liked to chew. My mum said that in real life, bunnies aren’t blue and so that made my bunny a magic bunny and so that’s what he was called, Magic. I remember—”
A noise on the stairs. She falters.
“Go on,” I whisper.
“I remember a sunny morning. Snowdrops around the bottom of the tree. Magic the rabbit had a shiny balloon tied to his little white tail. The balloon was a heart shape with writing on it that said ‘Birthday Girl.’ There were pancakes.”
“What was on the pancakes?”
“Chocolate sauce in the shape of a number three.” Maria yawns. She is warm against my shoulder.
“Your third birthday. Like in the photo?”
Maria pauses, her face screwed up in concentration. “Yes. Only—”
Another pause. This time we both hear a dragging sound behind one of the stone pillars. I try to keep Maria’s attention fixed on the memory.
“I don’t know how to explain it. They’re different, even though they’re the same memory. The snowdrop memory is like putting a new strip of cherry Wonderland in your mouth. Sugary and bright red. The photograph memory it is like after you’ve chewed it a long time and it is gray and clumpy and all the taste has run out.”
She is growing tired, heavy against my shoulder. I nod. I’ve been waiting for her to say something like this ever since I realized Maria has no scar on her face. There’s nothing there at all.
“What was your memory, Hazel?”
“Let’s see.” I close my eyes and focus on Joe. I try to picture our beautiful house in Wiltshire, where swifts would dive and swoop over the tall heads of foxgloves in summer, but there is something wrong. Something is diluting it, thinning it down until it runs between my fingers like water.
Instead, I have an image of Cathy, painting her toenails and laughing in Central Park as a cigarette burns between her fingers. I smile to myself. I remember this. Three years before I’d met Joe, I’dflown out to New York to stay with my sister. We’d got day-drunk, a pleasant buzz that had tilted us decadently toward an evening in Brooklyn. Danny was with a minder and we had some money in our pockets and Cathy had been telling a funny story about a man she’d dated, and we had laughed so long our stomachs hurt. I remember the sun, baking freckles onto my skin. Cathy and that pink nail varnish, her look of fierce concentration as she’d applied it to her toes. I’d told her she looked like our mother, and she’d told me cheerfully to fuck off and die.