‘Then do us a favour, love, and sod off.’
Still smiling, Oxana grabs the young woman’s bun, twists it until she’s gasping in pain, then wrenches her head backwards so that she and her chair fall backwards to the floor. Placing afoot on her victim’s throat, Oxana takes her bowl of cornflakes. ‘Thanks,love.’
The other occupants of the table stare at her open-mouthed. ‘Who are you?’ one of them whispers.
Oxana smiles. ‘I’m the new girl.’
8
‘So what have you got planned for today?’ Philippa asks Eve, as they clear the breakfast things away.
‘I thought I might go for a walk,’ Eve says vaguely, staring at the pottery mug in her hand.
Philippa watches her. ‘Anything I can do to help?’
‘A local map would be useful.’
‘I don’t mean like that.’ Philippa begins to fill the sink, and squirts Fairy Liquid into the roiling water as Pyewacket, mewing irritably, winds round her ankles.
‘Whatdoyou mean?’ Eve asks, more sharply than she’d intended.
‘I mean that you’re obviously in pain.’ Philippa heaps plates and cutlery into the sink. ‘You’re wounded. You’re trying to escape someone, but you’ve brought them with you.’
Eve looks at her blankly.
‘I’m sorry, it’s not my business.’ She adds the cat’s saucer to the washing up. ‘Forget I spoke. Really.’
‘But what did you mean?’
‘Nothing. I’ll get the map. It’s a lovely day to be out on the hills.’
An hour later, Eve is climbing a chalky path between fields of grass and buttercups. Ahead of her, the hills fold softly, almost voluptuously, into each other. Solitary oaks and elms shadow the hedgerows, but mostly there are just bright expanses of grass. Eve seats herself on a rickety stile, and it occurs to her that this landscape is one that she’s longed for, without knowing it, for years.
What would a life lived for myself look like? Loving Oxana meant following Oxana, and in a sense, living Oxana’s life. But I no longer have to do that. I can just be me. But who is that? Who am I without her? That’s what I’m here to discover. I have to empty my heart, close my eyes, turn my face to the wind, and listen to what it has to say.
Why did I never tell Oxana about these hills? About the place I grew up? Why did I never bring her here? Perhaps it’s that she was never really interested, or at least she never seemed to be. She always had this thing about my past, about not wanting to know too much, which I think was because she didn’t want to dwell too closely on her own. She never wanted to see goofy photos of me in my school uniform, for example, and got weird and uncomfortable if I tried to pin down specific facts about her own childhood. General background stuff was fine, the orphanage and so on. But if my questions got too specific, she wriggled out of it. Her later teen years, when she was clearly completely out of control, are pretty much a blank. And that Anna woman. Her teacher. There was certainly more to that relationship than she’s ever told me. Oxana lived in the present, she was always insistent on that, and she expected me to do thesame. It’s as if I was born, fully formed, the moment she came into my life.
But I do have a past. An ordinary, unspectacular past, but a real one. And I regret now how much of it I’ve lost. There was a time when I knew the names of the living things I saw. No longer. That bird, with its sharp metallic chirp, what’s that? Those miniature yellow flowers at the side of the path, what are they called? And those tiny powder-blue butterflies, dancing above them? Gone, all gone. Perhaps I never brought Oxana here because I knew, deep inside me, that one day I might need somewhere to hide from her. Somewhere to bolt to. Am I imagining that?
According to Eve’s map, there’s a triangulation point 500 metres ahead. It seems like a good place to aim for, and there will surely be spectacular views. Picking herself up, she starts to ascend the path, rye grass whipping at her trainers. From somewhere out of sight comes the tiny, irregular snarl of a small aircraft. Closer at hand, there’s the murmur of bees, and the high-pitched buzzing of grasshoppers in the overgrown verges. She walks on as if in a dream, the grasslands falling away to either side of her beyond clumps of dead nettles and cow parsley. She can see the triangulation point now. A small concrete pillar on the summit of the hill. She presses on, her hair sweaty, and a few minutes later she’s standing beside it.
The view is everything that she hoped for. The grasslands, the trees banked against the hillsides, the parchment-pale wheatfields, the deep stillness of it all. She sits down on the grass, leans back against the concrete pillar, breathes deeply, and closes her eyes. How long she stays there, not quite asleepbut not quite awake, she doesn’t know. But when she opens her eyes, she’s not alone. There’s a man standing there, silhouetted against the sky. He’s looking away from her, shading his eyes with one hand.
Sitting there, Eve feels slightly foolish, although she tells herself sternly that there’s absolutely no need to feel that way, and that she’s got as much right to be here as he has. Nevertheless, he has seen her asleep, which places her at a subtle disadvantage. Either way, her earlier mood has fled. She scrambles to her feet, and he turns. He’s wearing a faded blue shirt, jeans, and ancient, discoloured desert boots. He’s just an inch or two taller than she is. He peers at her for a moment. ‘Eve,’ he says. ‘Eve?’
9
The first class of the day at Ruffley Hall is domestic science. Specifically, the theory and practice of making marmalade. This is a revelation for Oxana, whose culinary skills are basic at best. She imagines Eve coming home to their flat to find a half-dozen jars nonchalantly cooling in the kitchen and realises too late that she meant to call her after breakfast. She tried last night but got an ‘out of service’ response. This makes her uneasy. Why would Eve decommission her phone? Is she avoiding her calls?
She’s not staying at the Hampstead Heath flat, that much is clear. Oxana spent half an hour there before leaving for Ruffley Hall, long enough to establish that Eve’s cabin case was gone, along with her trainers and washbag. So where is she? Obviously still very angry, her continuing silence confirms that.
Honestly, fuck her. Judgemental bitch. I feel my heart rate increase, feel a sick rush of adrenalin, and consciously clamp down on my anger. This, I know, is when I make reckless decisions. She’s gone, and I made her go. I didn’t mean to, butthings concertinaed. I lost my grip, got tough when I should have said sorry, and doubled down when I should have given way. This is what I do. I know that because Eve has told me so, repeatedly. She’s shown me how I repeat the same patterns again and again, and explained how this damages us both. She refuses to accept that this is just how I am. She won’t accept ‘my nature’ as an explanation of my behaviour. She won’t accept that our relationship is inherently unstable, or that there’s a fault line that can’t be mended. She insists that I’m better than that, that we’re better than that. That we just need to reset our hearts and minds. To decide, together, to change.
I wish I had her confidence in me. I understand, rationally and intellectually, what she wants. But the raw truth is that yesterday I was faced with a choice. Two choices. I could have come clean about taking the Twelve’s money, and I could have declined the Medusa contract, which clearly scares Eve witless. But I did neither. I did what I’ve always done: I chose what suited me. In the past, Eve’s gone along with such choices. But this time, maybe, I’ve gone too far. Then again, what does she expect? She’s excited by me. Not by cool, clever, marmalade-making me. Not by Oxana. She loves Oxana, but it’s Villanelle she needs. It’s Villanelle she lusts for. That’s her fatal flaw. She wants to feast with panthers.
Second lesson is self-defence. This is supervised by Sergeant Nobbs, a small gingery man who lines up the twenty-strong class in three ranks, then paces back and forth in front of them, fixing the students with an intense stare.
‘There may be occasions,’ he begins, ‘when the only thing standing between a child and a lifetime of sex-slavery is you, itsnanny.’ He glares at a slight, nervous-looking girl with mousy hair escaping from her bun. ‘What’s your name?’