His eyes are glassy and he smiles at her gratefully. ‘Yup,’ he says. ‘Good plan, and let’s get some coffee on too.’
She leads the way into the kitchen and starts to load the dishwasher. He watches her while the coffee machine grinds beans. ‘You really kept your figure, Luce,’ he says. ‘Not bad for a forty-year-old mom of two.’
‘Thirty-nine.’ She smiles tightly and drops two forks into the cutlery basket. ‘But thank you.’
The atmosphere is clumsy, slightly sour. They’ve left it too long for what comes next. They’ve drunk too much, eaten too much, sat for too long in the languorous air of the garden. Lucy says, ‘I need to get back to the kids soon.’
‘Oh,’ says Michael lightly. ‘Marco’s a big boy. He can look after his little sister a while longer.’
‘Yes, sure, but Stella gets a little anxious when she’s not with me.’
She sees his jaw twitch a little. Michael does not like to hear about weakness in others. He abhors it. ‘So,’ he says with a sigh, ‘I suppose you’ll want the passports?’
‘Yes. Please.’
Her heart thumps so hard under her rib cage that she can feel it in her ear canals.
He cocks his head and smiles at her. ‘But don’t rush off just yet? OK?’
He goes to his study and she can hear him opening and closing drawers. He returns a moment later, the passports in a felt drawstring bag in his hand. He waves it at her.
‘I am nothing if not a man of my word,’ he says, walking slowly towards her, his eyes on her, dangling the felt bag in front of him.
She can’t work out what he’s doing. Is he expecting her to snatch them from him? Chase him? What?
She smiles nervously. ‘Thank you,’ she says.
And then he is standing up against her, the small of her back hard against the kitchen counter, the felt bag clutched in his hand, his mouth heading towards the crook of her neck. She feels his lips against her throat. She hears him groaning.
‘Oh, Lucy Lucy Lucy,’ he says. ‘God, you smell so good. You feel so …’ He grinds himself against her. ‘So good. You are …’ He groans again and his mouth finds hers and she kisses him back. That is why she is here. She came here to fuck Michael and now she is going to fuck Michael and she has fucked him before and she can fuck him again, she really can, especially if she pretends he is Ahmed, pretends he is a stranger even, then yes, she can do this, she can do this.
She lets his tongue into her mouth and closes her eyes, tight, tight, tight. And his hands are pushing her up from behind, pushing her up on the counter and he takes her legs and he wraps them around his body, his hands gripping her ankles hard enough to make her wince, but she doesn’t stop, she carries on because this is what she came here to do. Behind them the coffee machine bubbles and hisses. She knocks an empty glass and it rolls across the counter, smashes against the side of the kettle. She tries to move her hand away from the broken glass but Michael is pushing her closer towards it, his hands pushing up the fabric of her skirt, searching for the waistband of her knickers. She tries to move across the counter away from the glass, but she doesn’t want to stop the momentum of what’s happening, she needs it to happen so that it is done, so that she can pull on her underwear and take the passports and go home to her babies. She tries to focus on helping him take off her underwear, but she can feel a shard of glass under her small of her back, pressing into her flesh. She tries one last time to shift herself across the counter and then Michael suddenly pulls away and says, ‘Fucking hell, will you stop fucking wriggling away from me. Fuck’s sake,’ and then he pushes down hard against her and she feels the glass pierce her skin and she jolts forward and shouts out in pain.
‘What the fuck is it now? For fuck’s sake!’
Almost in slow motion she sees his hand coming down towards her face and then she feels her teeth jolt inside her head, her brain slapping off the insides of her skull as he hits her.
And there is blood now, warm blood running from the small of her back. ‘I’m hurt,’ she says. ‘Look. There was glass and …’
But he’s not listening to her. Instead he forces her back on to the counter again, the glass piercing a new section of her back, and then he’s inside her and his hand is over her mouth and this was not how it was going to be. It was going to be consensual. She was going to let him. But now she hurts and there is blood and she can smell the charred meat on his hand, see the blank fury on his face and she just wants the passports, she wants the fucking passports, she does not want this and her hand finds a knife; it’s the knife she used to slice the tomatoes, the knife that cut through their skins like butter, and here it is in her hand and she plunges it into the side of Michael’s body, into the space below the hem of his T-shirt, the soft, tender white part where the skin is like a child’s skin and it goes in so easily she almost doesn’t register that she’s done it.
She sees his eyes cloud over briefly with confusion, then uncloud with realisation. He pulls out of her and staggers backwards. He gazes down at the blood pumping out of the hole in his side and covers it with his hands but the blood keeps pumping out. ‘Fucking Christ, Luce. What the fuck have you done?’ He gazes at her with wide, disbelieving eyes. ‘Help me. Fuck.’
She finds tea towels and puts them into his hands. ‘Hold them tight,’ she says, breathlessly, ‘hold them against it.’
He takes the cloths and presses them to his side and then she sees his legs buckle and he’s falling to the floor. She tries to help him up again but he bats her away. It suddenly occurs to Lucy that Michael is dying. She envisages herself making a phone call to the emergency services. She imagines them arriving here, asking her what happened. She would tell them that he raped her. There would be evidence. The broken glass still embedded in her back would be proof. The fact that he still has his trousers around his ankles. Yes, they would believe her. They would.
‘I’m calling an ambulance,’ she says to Michael whose eyes are staring blindly into nothingness. ‘Just keep breathing. Keep breathing. I’m calling them.’
She pulls her phone from her bag with shaking fingers, switches it on and is about to press the first digit when she realises this: she may well be believed, but she will not be released. She will have to stay in France, answer questions; she will have to reveal that she is here illegally, that she does not exist, and her children will be taken away from her and everything, absolutely everything will unravel, horribly, quickly, nightmarishly.
Her finger still rests on the screen of her phone. She glances down at Michael. He is trembling. Blood still flows from his side. She feels sick and turns to face the sink, breathing hard.
‘Oh God oh God oh God. Oh God oh God oh God.’
She turns back, looks at her phone, looks at Michael. She does not know what to do. And then she sees it; she sees the life pass from Michael’s body. She has seen it before. She knows what it looks like. Michael is dead.
‘Oh God. Oh God, oh God.’ She drops to her haunches and feels for his pulse. There is nothing.