NOVEL NEXT 35. Wilderness
35. Wilderness
2020 January 2
Thursday
Christine could watch Paige for hours. It barely matters where they are or what they’re doing; Paige could be brushing her teeth or writing an essay or preparing breakfast — she cracks eggs with the practised skill she brings to every endeavour; Christine once tried to replicate her method and ended up with shell in her hair — and Christine will happily lose herself in the sight. And lose herself in memories, too: Paige dressing, delicately buttoning a blouse, lacing a boot can so easily become Paige rising, flushed and spent, presenting slick fingers to Christine’s mouth.
This morning, Paige is addressing the assembled second years, all crammed into the second-floor kitchen, and Christine’s sat with Donna and Jodie, sipping tea and indulging herself. Paige meets her eye, catches her watching her, and as the blush warms Christine’s cheeks, Donna leans over and whispers, “You are so smitten.”
“I know,” Christine replies, sighing.
Paige winks at her.
Ordinarily it’d be far too early in the day to be organising so many people — too early in the year, probably — but today’s trip out has been Paige’s passion project for almost a month, and her enthusiasm has spread to almost everyone she’s invited along. Christine’s still not sure how Paige got Aunt Bea to agree to a roller-skating outing so readily, but she’s grateful that, so far, everything seems to be going according to plan. All the second years are coming, and Donna’s providing a sponsor presence, and thus Jodie’s coming along, too. And, God, Christine’s glad of that: she hasn’t spent nearly enough time with Jodie, and she’s all too aware that it’s not too long before they all start moving on to the next stage of their lives. She wanted Julia and Yasmin to come as well, but Yasmin’s on call today and Julia’s at the office, which information Julia supplied yesterday with, Paige said, what appeared to be genuine regret.
Christine’s talked them both into a night on the town next week to make up for it. Julia consented to come more readily than Christine expected, but it’s possible Yasmin’s been working on her, extolling the virtues of leaving one’s room every so often. Which is presumably why Yasmin’s not whiling away her on-call hours in her room; she’s here instead, leaning against the far wall and backing up Paige’s assertions to the second years with the odd supportive or explanatory remark.
Yes, fine, Yasmin’s also here because Christine knocked on her door before and promised coffee and toast if she came and hung out with the second years for a bit.
Does Christine want everyone to get along? To love each other? To miss each other when eventually they have to part ways? Damn fucking right she does! Indira might call it ‘sponsor behaviour’ and Paige might gently point out that she’s attempting the same kind of social engineering that brought her out of her shell mere months ago, but Christine’s just brazening through it, celebrating her successes wherever she finds them. Call her soppy, she doesn’t care.
Paige does call her soppy, but she kisses her before and after, so it’s fine.
“You’re adorable, you know,” Donna says. “Both of you.”
“One of us more than the other, I think,” Christine says, still watching Paige.
Jodie, sitting on the other side of Donna and industriously putting away a full set of egg and soldiers, giggles. “Things like that just make you more adorable,” she says.
“Don’t talk with your mouth full,” Donna says absently.
Jodie swallows, apologetically covering her mouth with her hand. “Sorry. Christine’s still adorable, though.”
“And don’t get egg on your goth gloves,” Donna adds, reaching over and tugging at them.
Christine feels the heat of another gaze and looks up to meet Yasmin’s eyes; the girl is smirking at her. “Are you going to call me adorable, too?” Christine asks, scowling, and Yasmin reaches up with her free hand and zippers her lips.
On second thought, maybe Christine should move out right now and live alone forever.
The lecture’s winding up. Paige, impressively, managed to keep it mostly on topic — rules for outings for non-graduates — despite the girls pestering her for makeup advice and passing tips. She’s promised to cover all that at a later date, against her better judgement; Paige is being dragged into the daily workings of Dorley just the way Christine did, except that Paige volunteered to take the second years out, promising to keep an eye on them and ensure their conformity to the Hall’s standards for those who have not yet graduated. Christine’s involvement, as with everything else, was assumed.
Paige directs the second years’ attention to the clothing rack that’s been lurking against the far wall of the kitchen all morning.
In theory, the second years have access to all the clothes they could possibly want. But because they’re still not even halfway through the intended length of the programme, and since the only ones among them to have actually been outside are Bex — whose private nickname appears to have spread to the entire Hall; Paige has joked: only to those with whom she has been intimate, i.e. the entire Hall — and Faye, and since that was strictly by order and a one-time deal, no-one’s thought to buy any of them suitable winter coats. Ordinarily they’d get some out of storage, but there’s been an unusually high number of graduates visiting recently, and the winter coat rack, like the Hall’s supplies of umbrellas and progesterone, has been extensively predated upon.
So Paige is providing outerwear from her own supply.
“I’m never taking this off,” Aisha says, posing in the morning light. She’s found a black trench coat with red accents, and Christine’s got to admit that it looks amazing on her. “I’m sorry, Paige. This is mine now.”
“Go ahead,” Paige says, “keep it. It’s just a knockoff.”
“Um,” Anne asks, “of what?”
“Of whom,” Fiona corrects, in her soft, husky voice. “It’ll be designer. A specific designer.”
That’s another thing to add to this morning’s small list of successes, then: Anne and Fiona, the two quietest second years, rarely speak up around others. Christine knows little about them except that they’re shy, and a couple. She finds herself wondering how they kiss: Anne’s one of the shortest Dorley girls Christine’s ever seen, shorter even than Abby, and Fiona’s over six feet. Perhaps there’s a stepladder involved.
“Alexander McQueen,” Paige says absently. “There should be a belt for it somewhere.”
Someone inside the coat rack shouts, “I’ve got it!” and after a moment, Mia emerges, still wearing the hoodie Paige has been trying all morning to get her to swap for something nice, and holding out the belt. She and Aisha exchange kisses.
“If you want adorable,” Christine says to Donna, elbowing her gently for emphasis and flicking her pointing finger between the three second-year couples, “there you are.”
Donna pretends to consider it. “Nope,” she says. “You’re still the most adorable.”
“Damn.”
“You love it.”
Christine shrugs, affecting indifference. She sometimes wonders what her old self would have made of interactions like this, but over the years has concluded that, as much as he might have balked at the specifics, he’d probably be most distracted by the realisation that anyone was talking to him with any affection at all. Forget the skirts; people like him?
The thought makes her smile.
“I knew it,” Donna says. “You love it.”
“Guilty.”
“Okay,” Donna says, standing to address the whole room. “You lot finish picking out your coats and get your shoes on. Jodie and I will bring the minibus round to the car park by the lake.”
“You can drive a minibus?” Mia asks.
“Mia, sweetheart,” Donna says as she leaves, “I contain multitudes. I can drive many things.”
“She’s not forklift certified,” Jodie adds, following her.
From out in the corridor, Donna yells, “Not yet!”
With the meeting broken up, there’s one of those moments of indecision Christine’s come to think of as institutional — do we make small talk? do we just… leave? someone show us what to do! — and then Paige claps her hands and starts gathering up second years, making sure each one has a coat and a specially issued phone, and leads them out into the corridor. As she goes, she reiterates the penalties for running off in a rote, resigned sort of way; no-one seriously believes any of the second years is going to try anything.
And then it’s just Christine and Yasmin, and a few seconds of silence that feel like they’re about to become awkward. Christine tries to think of something to say, but Yasmin beats her to it.
“I’m going to miss this place,” she says, pushing away from the wall and walking over to rinse her coffee mug in the sink. She drops it onto the drying rack, text facing outwards, and Christine recognises it as one of Edy’s (very few) contributions to the collection:
Amazing Grace, how sweet the sound
That saved a wretch like me
I once was lost but now am found
I just wish she’d set me free
“Oh?” Christine says. It’s not something she ever expected Yasmin to say, even after she softened on the rest of them.
Yasmin turns to face her again and leans on the edge of the kitchen counter, supporting herself with her hands in a posture so incredibly Paige-like that Christine momentarily overproduces saliva.
“Yeah,” she says. “There’s a sort of—” she quirks her lips as she thinks, “—a girl scouts misbehaving vibe these days. Second years running around, making little private jokes to each other. It’s sweet.” She frowns. “Strange that they seem so young, when…”
“When they’re basically our age?” Christine finishes when Yasmin doesn’t seem to be able to. Yasmin nods. “I know. I wonder if we were the same. I mean,” she adds quickly, “not like they are, not exactly, but I bet Pippa’s lot thought we were a bunch of moody adolescents.”
“And we think our follow-up year’s a bunch of giggly schoolchildren,” Yasmin says, nodding. She taps her nails on the underside of the countertop. “Must be something about going through puberty again. It gets weird the second time around.”
“You’re coming next week, right?” Christine says. She doesn’t want to be so blunt, but she’s got to be in the minibus in about a minute, and something about the look on Yasmin’s face has her doubting everything.
“I’m coming,” Yasmin says. “What’s up? Why so nervous?”
“I— I don’t know.”
Yasmin walks quickly over, lays a hand on Christine’s. “I do,” she says. “You’re going to miss this place, too.”
“I’m not sure I’m going to get to leave,” Christine says gloomily. “Every time I turn around I get another job, or there’s another crisis that isn’t being properly handled. Did you hear about bloody Rachel Gray-Wallace?”
“I heard. I’m not worried. She’s too tied to Shahida and Melissa to make a public fuss. But I didn’t mean you’ll miss the Hall, not really. I mean you’ll miss how it is now, with all of us here. You’re a natural mother hen, Christine. You want to gather everyone you love in one place and keep them all safe.”
“I’m not—”
“It’s true,” Yasmin says. “You are. It’s part of why everyone loves you back. You know that, right?” Christine stares up at her, and Yasmin leans down, kisses her hair where it parts. “Don’t worry. We’ll all stay in touch. Even Julia.”
“You really mean it?” It comes out with all the yearning Christine can’t suppress.
Yasmin taps her lightly on the head, right where she kissed her. “I mean it,” she says.
* * *
Wouldn’t it be clean if he were fixed? Wouldn’t it be convenient? If Tabitha had reached inside him and found the frayed edge of string that unravelled the knot that tied closed the door that kept trapped the girl he’d always dreamed of being? Wouldn’t that be fucking lovely?
Slam. The punching bag recoils from him, swings in an arc, comes back to him. He steps away from it, keeps on his toes, reaches out to steady it, prepares it for another strike.
He remembers the fantasy of it, clear as day. Because how could he not? It’s the dream that was the death of him — the death of her — and it plagued him for weeks, hollowed him, made him rattle with empty horror at the desires it uncovered. The impossible, dreadful dream.
Slam. This time he hits it twice, once with each hand, and the dull thud of his gloves on the canvas is a memory, too, one more acceptable to someone of his size, of his shape, of his history.
Their house always had thin walls, and it was the laughter from the bedroom of the place next door that did it. He sat there on his parents’ bed, in his mother’s dress, in the wreckage of himself, his dick in his hand, and everything he could have been died at that moment. And they didn’t even know about him. Couldn’t know. Probably were just watching the telly or something.
He died anyway. Because he’d already seen himself, had thoroughly and dreadfully witnessed himself, and he knew that if he ever did this again, if he ever went further, if he ever gave in, then laughter would be the most generous reaction he could expect to inspire.
Fucking laughter saved him. That’s the worst part. He was already half out of his mother’s dress when he heard his dad’s car. Gave him time to cover his tracks. The laughter saved him and ended him, all at once.
Almost caught. Maybe if there’d been consequences, things would be different.
Yeah.
No.
Maybe they’d be exactly the fucking same.
Slam. Kill this fucking punching bag, honestly. Slam. Rip it to shreds. Slam. Take it apart, spill the sand from its base, tear off the canvas cover. Slam. Because we’re all reducible to our parts, aren’t we? And we know what yours are, don’t we, Will? Six foot three of broad bone and a face not even a mother could love, not after the shit you did. Ingredients for a violent, worthless, man.
Slam.
What did Tab say? Months ago? That Topher sighed with relief when he found out his brother was missing. And of course he did. No need to worry any more that William fucking Schroeder might burst through the door and batter him again.
This body.
This mind.
This man.
Good for nothing but violence.
Slam.
“Will!”
He hadn’t realised how numb he’d become, how unaware, how absent, until hot hands grab him, hold him, resist his pushback, and now Tabitha’s here, keeping him in place, and for a brief, coherent second he worries that he hit her, that he hurt her, that he did it again, but there’s nothing but concern in her eyes, and that’s enough to rip away the last of his energy. He stumbles and she takes his weight, and as his head rests against her bare shoulder he realises that at some point back there, somewhere inside the memories and the chill that has him from head to toe, he started crying.
* * *
Okay, so, yeah: roller-skating’s easy. You push out with your feet, you let the friction guide you, you keep yourself steady, and if you’re feeling especially flash, you go up on one foot to impress the girls.
The other girls.
Faye laughs to herself. She’s not slipping up so much on that any more, not since she saw a pretty girl in a pretty dress in the mirror and realised that her first thoughts were no longer about whether she could possibly see herself in that girl, but whether Bex could see herself inside that girl.
She laughs again. The other girls tell her she has a filthy mind. That’s fine.
She attempts a pirouette, a spin, a glide. When she hears clapping from one of the tables at the edge of the rink, she bows.
“Bravo!” Christine yells.
“Stupendous!” Jodie adds.
Vicky just wolf whistles.
“Very flash!” says the last girl. A new one, not from Dorley, but Faye’s seen her around, exchanged the odd word with her. Still has trouble remembering her name. Lorna? Lorna. Dating Vicky, who landed on her butt twenty minutes ago and decamped to join her girlfriend and the other third years at their table for a sympathetic kiss and a Pepsi Max.
Normally Faye would find it difficult to be around an outsider, but Lorna’s different. And she sort of hates to admit it, but Lorna’s different because she’s trans. And that shouldn’t matter — she still remembers Marshall, the trans boy at her school, whenever she wants to feel especially guilty — but it does, and it feels unworthy of her to group Lorna apart for that reason alone. It’s the sort of thing Bex would gently scold her about, midway through their first year, when Faye was trying desperately to unlearn all the things she hadn’t even realised she’d been taught: trans women are women, idiot.
But it makes her feel safe around her. The idea that someone who doesn’t share her history — the history which, in broad strokes, she shares with everyone in the Hall — nevertheless still can relate to it, understand it, empathise with it… It’s exciting. It’s comforting. Who better to understand such a metamorphosis?
The cis girls, though. None of them are here today, thankfully, but they’ve been showing up a lot lately. And when it was just Shahida, well, that was okay. Shahida’s kind, and curious in a gentle kind of way.
Rachel, though, she’s scary. She tried to grill Bex the other night. Had to be led away by Shahida and Melissa.
Bex had nightmares.
Faye shakes her head. She can think about that shit any time; she shouldn’t be wasting her time on it here, now. Not when she could be doing this!
There’s more applause when she slows to a stop. She decides to go bask in it.
“Hey, sporty girl,” Christine says, as Faye rolls up to the table. They’re not technically supposed to go above a certain speed outside the rink, but they’ve booked the whole place out, so no-one’s in danger of accidentally rolling over someone’s five-year-old.
“Hey, lazy girl,” Faye replies, and worries instantly that she’s being too familiar. Christine’s a third year! And more than that, she’s—
“Rude,” Christine comments, and her grin is as reassuring as the rude gesture that accompanies it.
Faye giggles. And wow, Christine looks great today. Obviously she’ll claim that Paige dressed her, that all accolades should go to the tall, fashionable one, but with her blue and white skater dress and her hair up she looks almost as beautiful as she did that first day, when they first got to know each other, when Christine and Paige wore their butterfly dresses and outshined every other woman in the building.
Every woman other than Bex, obviously.
And Christine’s not the only beautiful woman at the table. Jodie’s made herself up pale and dramatic in a manner that wouldn’t suit Faye but which she kind of wants to see on Mia, especially with those fishnet gloves; Vicky’s classically beautiful even in the jeans and loose shirt combo she has on; and Lorna, rolling back from the concessions stand, is gorgeous, too, in a way Faye knows she’s insecure about, but which reminds her of how Bex looked towards the end of the first year. To say nothing of Donna and Paige herself, both indulging themselves on the rink behind her.
Suddenly very aware of herself, Faye pulls at the hem of her skirt, grateful that Paige made all the girls wear lycra shorts underneath; protecting the second years’ modesty is, Paige said, a matter of decency and operational security. How can she just stand here in front of such incredible women!
She reminds herself, as she still sometimes has to, that none of her elders intend to judge her, and tries to remember what she was going to say, before she got sidetracked by beauty and insecurity.
“You’re not skating,” she says.
“I put on the boots,” Christine says, poking a leg out from under the table and wiggling a skate at Faye, “and had a sudden crisis of stability. And then she—” she points at Vicky, “—bruised her arse, and that doubled my desire to stay still and watch the rest of you.” Her gaze flickers away from them for a second. “Well, mainly watch Paige.”
“You’ve got to try it,” Faye says. It’s a bit of a whine, but she’s been working on her voice and she’s pleased with the registers she can reach; this one has a touch of the offended teenage girl about it, and it’s fun to play with.
Christine pouts at her. “No.”
“Tinaaaa,” she says, borrowing Vicky’s nickname for her.
“No.”
“You won’t fall. I’ll keep you steady.”
“I’ll fall,” Christine says, as Bex rolls up and hooks an arm around Faye’s waist. “I’ll find a way.”
“What’s up?” Bex asks.
“Your bloody girlfriend’s trying to embarrass me,” Christine says.
“Bex,” Faye whines, “she won’t skate.”
With a giggle, Bex says, “Oh, I think we can solve that.”
It takes the two of them, and the tacit approval of everyone else nearby — Paige rolling up to observe but cruelly, in Christine’s very loudly expressed view, remaining neutral — but she and Bex manage eventually to get Christine up on her skates and rolling slowly towards the rink.
“No,” Christine says again, and there’s less amusement there now.
“It’s okay,” Faye says. “Just concentrate on keeping yourself steady. Bex and I will steer.”
“You’re in good hands,” Bex echoes.
“No?” Christine whispers, but she doesn’t struggle.
Together, the three of them lace a gentle figure of eight around the rink. Faye and Bex take the weight of the curves, allowing Christine to lean on them. The other second years skate around them and past them, occasionally expressing how impressed they are with Christine’s progress, which Christine takes, every time, as a great personal insult. After four complete circuits they let her go, and it’s with a resigned laugh that Faye and Bex watch Christine wobble gracelessly to the edge of the rink, to be rescued by Paige and escorted back to the table, where what looks like a bowl of ice cream awaits her, along with much comforting.
She and Bex return to their figure-of-eight pattern, and trace a faster and more tightly curved path around the rink together than they did with Christine.
Hand in hand.
God, this feels good.
They’ve been talking a lot amongst themselves about their futures, about their lives. It was some of the first advice Faye got from Christine, and she’s spread it around. And Christine was right: most of them were, that night and in the weeks after, still struggling in one way or another, and looking to the future was a great help. Faye asked for, and Indira provided, a list of Dorley girls who’d gone on to have careers away from the Hall, and though it was heavily redacted it was sufficient. Dozens of women — and not-women, and kinda-women — living their lives, returning to Dorley Hall only for the occasional indulgent banquet, to see old friends, and to steal coats, umbrellas and progesterone.
There’s life as a girl, should you have the courage to reach for it.
But she and Bex were still the only two of their intake to leave the Hall, and just taking their first steps past the threshold had been nerve-wracking and exhausting. Not exactly a knock to her confidence, since they weren’t exposed — not as Dorley girls, not as trans girls — but not a salve for it, either.
This, however.
She’s still holding Bex’s hand, so she raises it above their heads and twirls, lets her skirt billow out, and shrieks with the sheer joy of it. She’s out in the world. She’s free. And Bex and their friends and their sometime lovers are all with her.
“Ew,” Bex says, holding her hand to her mouth in mock disgust and momentarily bursting Faye’s bubble. But Bex just nods, indicating something behind them, and with a hand on her hips, turns Faye around.
They’ve booked out the rink but not the whole entertainment complex, and there’s a walkway on the other side of the glass. People have been going back and forth along there all morning, from the cinema to the bowling alley and the food court, and right now there’s a group of boys, maybe Faye’s age, maybe a bit younger, pressed up against the glass, watching them skate. Leering.
One of them catches Faye’s eye and makes the wanking-off gesture with his hand, and for a moment Faye’s caught up in the strangest feeling of relief: that awful little shit could have been her. That awful little shit once was her. Staring at girls but walled off from them, able to exercise power only through his implied position, as a man, as the one who ought to have the power, but who is insecure enough in its possession to have to show it off.
Pathetic. Sort of tragic, really. He and his friends will never know how it feels to be free.
Bex still has a hand on her hip, so Faye takes it, spins her, holds her, dips her, and exchanges with her a long and luxurious kiss. With her free hand, she gives the watching boys the finger, and she’s delighted to see that Bex does, too, and they skate away, giggling, forgetting for now that there were ever boys in their lives, that they ever walked among them.
Faye’s never felt more complete.
* * *
“Tell me about it,” she said, so he did. And she kept her hands on him throughout, brushed his sweaty hair out of his face, unlaced his gloves and massaged his sore knuckles, and for his part he did his best not to yank his hands out of hers, for as much as he wanted to lock them behind his back, as much as he needed to turn away from her, he knew she wanted him to stay with her, to stay present. To stop hiding, in all the forms he’s found in which to hide.
He doesn’t worry he’ll hurt her. Not so much, not any more, not outside brief moments of fear. But it’s a matter of whether he deserves to be touched so gently, to be cared for, to be made into someone who matters with deft fingers and careful words. Because if there’s one thing that’s been coming for him in the middle of the night, over and over, wearing him out, staining his sheets with sweat and tears, bruising his flesh, it’s that if his brother could see Tabitha Forbes fussing over him, he’d pull her away, warn her, protect her.
“I feel stupid,” he mutters, because it’s better than admitting that when he looks into her eyes all he wants to do is tell her to run from him. “I get lost in it. And I should be better at this.”
“Who says?” she whispers. Touches his cheek with the back of a finger. “I don’t.”
A girl, dressed up, provoking him; that same girl accusing him, challenging him.
“Bethany’s better at this,” he says.
“Bethany is a little shit,” she says, sincere. It forces a half-smile out of him. She’s still holding him, pinching his palm. “And you know there are ways she has it easier.”
He nods. They’ve covered this. Endlessly. Because obvious truths just won’t fix themselves in his head, but lies need to be uttered only once to take up permanent residence.
So stupid.
She says it anyway. “You’ve spent your whole life thinking about this. Or finding ways to not think about it. For her, it’s an escape; for you, it’s a site of trauma. And, come on, look at her: being a strong, masculine man was never a viable shield for her. For you…”
He nods again. He almost made it work; whole months without succumbing to the desperate, gnawing need.
“I get it,” she continues. “I was as tall as you are now, and just as bulky. Being a certain way… it was just there. In front of me. A weapon, lying there, waiting for me to pick it up.”
“Not quite the same,” he says.
“Not quite, no,” she says, leaning against the wall and transferring her touch to his knee. “But it’s similar enough.”
Since he learned the truth, since he learned everything that Tabitha Forbes is and was, he’s wondered how she fared. She had his temper, she says, and his build, and even a close enough family life. But she’s Black and he’s white, and the weapon she describes has and will always carry harsher penalties for someone like her than someone like him.
He doesn’t bring it up with her any more, though. The one time he did, he spiralled, and she pulled him out of it, gently and with fond amusement. She doesn’t need him guilty, she said; she needs him better.
“Sorry,” he says anyway, and she pokes him.
“Stop that.”
The wall here’s warm. A few more degrees above ambient than Will expects from painted concrete. Tabby didn’t know why when he asked her; Monica said she thinks there’s a generator behind there, or the servers for the security room, or something. It doesn’t matter. They’ve moved their equipment out of the prep room — still, no-one will tell him what ‘prep’ means in this instance, though he has a few guesses — and into one of the rooms farther down the corridor. It’s smaller and has even more of the feel of an underground bunker to it, but it has the virtue of being semi-permanent. Monica and Tabby moved in a couple of benches, a couple of lockers, and put up a Hang in There, Baby! poster.
He asked about the poster, which seemed out of character, and was drily informed that, like everything else here, it’s another in-joke.
“I mean it,” she says after a little while. “Don’t compare yourself to Bethany. Or Steph, or Martin, or Raph, or anyone. Everyone’s different. Everyone has their own path.” She taps herself on the chest. “For example, I wouldn’t be hanging around in here with Ollie.”
He snorts. The man’s finally out of the cell again, but he’s locked in his room unless he’s being actively supervised, so the difference is moot. Harmony said they only moved him because the cell needed fumigating.
That’s another thing. He remembers his confused jealousy at the way the sponsors used to talk to Steph, how they made room for her, shared amused glances with her, treated her a little bit like one of them, even when she was still ostensibly hiding herself from everyone. And when he discovered Steph’s secret, the jealousy intensified: of course they relate to her and not him! Because she’s really a girl.
Tabby pulled it out of him one tearful night. People are mirrors, she told him after, and while they are both girls, Steph merely suppressed her true self, and did so quite poorly. He, on the other hand, had a good fucking go at killing his.
Go find yourself, go heal yourself, go love yourself, and see how the other women relate to you.
He frowns, suddenly curious. “What would you do with Ollie?” he asks.
She leans away from the wall for a moment, the better to look askance at him, and then settles back down with an amused hiss.
“I think there’s a point with every boy — or, at least, every boy who ends up here — where they decide on what they have to do, who they think they have to be to get along. I think, if he were mine, I’d look to finding who he was before that, before he made himself hard and stupid. Find the boy inside the man. Of course,” she adds, “that’s not Harmony’s approach. She’s trying to get the little fucker to stop justifying his bullshit first. I don’t know; maybe that’s the better way. For him.”
“What about me? And my bullshit?”
She laughs. “Yours is way twistier. But you’ve made a good start. I wouldn’t be sitting like this with October’s Will.”
“You’re not looking for the little boy in me?” he asks, unable to stop himself from pressing on it. The idea is distasteful.
“No, stupid. I’m looking for the little girl. The one you kept telling yourself wasn’t real. And—” she leans away from the wall again, this time to smile gently at him and squeeze his hand, “—she’s closer to the surface than you think. Sometimes I can almost see her.”
And that’s too much. He sits there in his stupid little shorts and his stupid sports bra and with his lengthening hair held back by a stupid fucking hair band that he looked at five times in the mirror when he put it on because he couldn’t believe how it looked, nestling in his hair, framing his face, and he fucking cries all over again. And she holds him and she comforts him and above all, she loves him, because she is, as she keeps insisting, his Sister.
* * *
Rachel should not have come into the office today. It’s the boredom that’s the worst. The endless hours. The second of January: not traditionally the day on which anything gets done. Not traditionally the day on which anyone of note comes in at all. And if it were last year — hell, if it were last month — she would have appreciated the quiet, been glad that she didn’t have to stick in her earbuds and blast rain sounds to drown out Davina’s endless chatter in the next cubicle, but Davina’s not here, and Rachel is, so here she sits in silence, staring at her phone.
Almost better to be here than at home, anyway. Things have been tense. She can’t tell Belinda why she’s angry, beyond that it has something to do with her old friends, because then she’ll want to do something about it, and that kind of catalyst Rachel could do without, especially since she’s struggling not to do something about it herself.
That fucking place. Dorley Hall. Where they take young men — boys, really — who have supposedly done terrible things, and… torture them. Confine them underground and control their diets and inject them with hormones and surgically modify them! And she’s tried to be generous, to accept the framing pressed on her by Melissa and Shahida and that boy-girl Paige, that they ultimately benefit from it, that they learn to appreciate the second chance, that they come to hate their former selves, but how can she?
There are fucking channels! Someone’s an unrepentant wife-beater, you report them! Someone’s got a pattern of sexual harassment, you report them! It’s the way things are done!
Oh yeah? she asks herself. And how often does that pan out, here in the real world?
She could call the police. Have them storm the place. Have them free the boys down there, the ones in what everyone insists euphemistically on calling ‘the basement’. And then…
And then what? They go free? She heard the other day about how some regional police department recently disposed of hundreds of rape kits that had never been tested. Hundreds of rapes, ignored. Hundreds of victims who retraumatised themselves for the police, for nothing. And she knows full well that ‘lesser’ crimes, mere beatings and assaults and other forms of violence against women, fare no better.
The solution to that is not torture!
Maybe it ought to be.
“Fuck,” she mutters to herself. That’s the worst thing about Dorley Hall: if she thinks too long about what the victims have allegedly done, she finds herself wondering if the ‘sponsors’ might have a fucking point.
She concentrates on what she knows: kidnapping, torture, mutilation. All crimes. All wrong. All despicable. And that’s not even considering the psychological manipulation! That woman Indira explained to her how it works, how a ‘sponsor’ forms a personal connection with a victim and gains their trust, manipulates them until they no longer think like a man, no longer act like a man, no longer want to be a man. Those aren’t Indira’s words, no; she couched it in what Rachel might have called ‘therapy-speak’, if said therapy was from another fucking world.
She spat it all back at her, of course. Pushed every button she could think of. And Indira, who maintained her calm the whole time, who seemed so bloody amused by the whole thing, had an answer: “We don’t gaslight them, dear. We do not aim to persuade them that the metaphorical light has or has not been dimmed or brightened. Quite the opposite: we encourage them to look clearly at the light for the first time in their lives.”
Glib. But Rachel had no response. Even now, days and a handful of hangovers later, she still doesn’t have one, except to go find a paper dictionary and look up words like abuse and manipulation and march back in there, pointing at the page and screaming until someone there pays attention.
She’d stewed for a bit and then switched topics, asked how she could possibly expect women to feel safe in a house packed with violent criminals, even rapists, and Indira had replied in her calm and steady fashion that none of her girls are rapists, and added sweetly that if Rachel ever implied such a thing again then she, Indira, would be rather put out.
In the silence that had followed, a woman at a nearby table sucked air through her teeth.
She stares at her phone.
Fucking Dorley Hall.
She can’t think of it without thinking about Melissa. About the way Shahida looked at her when she implied — no, be honest, Rachel; outright fucking stated — that if Melissa came from the Hall then maybe she isn’t the girl they all thought she was. And the way Shahida said that she wouldn’t tell Melissa what she said.
It’d break her heart.
She loves you.
And she thought better of you.
Hah! Thought better of her! There’s no way Melissa could possibly have thought that Rachel might react some other way to the revelation that Melissa’s womanhood had brutally been carved into her in the underground torture chambers of a multi-decade kidnapping operation! Make it make sense!
Fucking Amy had a go at her as well. Babbled some nonsense about how there are so many things she can’t know, so many things she doesn’t have the right to know, that all she can do is ask the girls what they think about themselves and accept the answer. And so Rachel did, and every girl’s answer was a variation on the same theme: “I needed help, and although this wasn’t the help I expected, it worked out just fine.” As if every boy-girl ‘graduate’ sat down and rehearsed their own unique cult-initiation vows, just in case some pushy outsider comes along and demands to hear them.
Amy didn’t come to Belinda’s New Year’s party. First one she’s missed in a long time. Rachel’s never seen her so angry.
She stares at her phone.
She can’t call the police. She can’t do that to—
To whom? To Melissa? Does she even know her? Does Melissa even exist, or is she a construct, a creation of her ‘sponsor’? Did they replace the sweet boy Rachel knew? Did they, effectively, kill him?
So what about Shahida, then? You want to throw her into the arms of the police?
Fuck.
She needs to talk to someone. And she needs to go back to Dorley Hall. To understand. To see if there’s anything there to understand.
Because right now it looks like a hundred counts of kidnapping, torture, and many other things besides. And that’s something she’s honour-bound to see destroyed.
* * *
There’s a rhythm to life at Stenordale Manor, and Trevor has, to his reluctance, settled into it. He wakes, he washes, he dresses. He does his makeup. He fucking disappears while he pretties himself up — dissociation, that’s what Frankie called it; Valérie hit her and told her to stop reading books — but he gets through it. And then all that’s left is to complete the day’s work. Cooking, cleaning, organising. Not so different from his busier days at Peckinville, really, though at the PMC he mostly didn’t want to rip himself apart.
Val said today that he’s lucky, that if this were the Stenordale of thirty years ago he’d be required to perform more intimate services. Trevor contested that luck, yelled at her that the Smyth-Farrow siblings still lurk in his future, and she slapped him. Told him she did him the favour of euphemising things she was forced vividly to experience. Told him to go whine to the unmarked graves of her sisters about a future that has yet to arrive.
He’s still not sure if that was a performance for the cameras or if she really was that pissed off with him, but they haven’t spoken since, and he carried out the remainder of his duties alongside her — cleaning up after dinner — in silence, before retiring to his room.
His room. Just a place where he goes to hide his head under the fucking pillow. It was Declan’s before it was his, though there’s no trace of the man’s personality. It makes sense: from what Frankie’s told him, Declan was practically catatonic through the early days of his tenure here, which strikes Trevor as probably the most sensible possible response to getting chopped up the way they both did, but which isn’t a state conducive to home decorating.
Fucking Declan. He’s lost, absolutely and completely. He’s sunk further into the Dina role every time Trevor sees him; at dinner tonight he was actually smiling when Jake addressed him, though Trevor also saw the flinches, the wariness, and the occasional flash of pure dread. Sometimes he wants to reach out and shake him, to demand to know why he’s given in, but he knows why: if he had to suffer the attention of Jake, all day every day, he’d probably have given in by now. Why not become what they want, if it hurts less?
Absurd to think, despite the drastic modifications to his body, that he’s gotten off easy, whether he compares himself to Declan, to Valérie, or to the many others who have passed through this place on their way to an early death.
He can see into the quad from the window here. All the rooms on this corridor can. Housing Val here was probably old Smyth-Farrow senior’s idea of a cruel joke. Sometimes when she’s left her door open a crack, he can see her leaning on the windowsill, looking out. He hasn’t dared ask her about it.
Fuck. She really was mad at him, wasn’t she?
He needs to apologise.
But he looks like crap. He’s been working all day and he hasn’t refreshed his makeup. And while he loathes the new face he’s been given, Valérie is noticeably pleased when he makes the effort, so he stretches and reaches for the wipes on his bedside table.
He doesn’t get the opportunity to finish. He’s half done cleaning his face when the door slams open. He doesn’t see it happening, is lost in thought about what he wants to say to Valérie, so it’s the noise of it that alerts him, startles him, pushes his heart into his mouth, and when he looks up he drops the hand mirror and plunges his hands into the mattress and plants his feet harder against the floor.
Jake’s drunk. It’s obvious from the start. He stands like a drunk man, legs splayed, hands lacking purchase. His mouth is locked in the sneer of the inebriated, his bloodshot eyes take in the room unsteadily and his rough cheeks are repulsively reddened.
“Theresa,” he says, struggling with it.
There’s a window of time in which Trevor could, feasibly, dart around him, get out, run away down the corridor, hide from him in the recesses of the manor, but while the man is drunk, he’s also big enough to fill most of the doorway, and trying to escape might make what’s coming next all the worse.
Because Trevor knows what’s coming next. There’s no other reason to be here. A stray, violent thought escapes: Isn’t that what Declan is for?
“It’s after hours,” he says, trying to keep his voice steady, trying to keep his whole fucking self steady. He thinks he might rip the sheets from how hard he’s pulling on them, anchoring himself with his grip.
“Yeah,” Jake grunts. “Yeah, I s’pose it is.”
“So go to bed,” Trevor says, raising his voice. If he has to face this, maybe he doesn’t have to do so alone. Maybe Valérie can help. Or get help. Or—
Jake scolds him with a raised finger. “Ah-ah-ah! I’ve locked her in. Your little friend, Vincent. She can’t help you. And Frankie? That soft-touch cunt? She can’t help you either. She’s sleeping half a building away. Too old for this work. Too old and too soft.”
The man’s still slovenly propped up by the doorjamb, and for a moment Trevor hopes against motherfucking hope that he stays there, that he’s just come to scare him, that he knows he can’t do anything to mark the Smyth-Farrows’ precious prize, but it’s clear Jake’s too drunk to care, too drunk to consider it, and as if reading his mind, Jake steps forward, steps backward, practically falls through the door, recovers grotesquely, and drops himself onto the mattress.
He’s too fucking close.
“The-re-sa,” Jake sings, and then he laughs. “Got that from Dina, didn’t I? She likes to do that with names. I think she likes the sound of it. And me? I think it’s cute. I’ve been encouraging it. What do you think, The-re-sa?”
“I don’t care.”
“Oh,” Jake says, like a disappointed teacher, “but you have to care, Theresa. It’s your job to care. If I say it is.”
Trevor asks the inevitable question. “Why are you here, Jacob?”
Jake slumps, leans back on the bed, tucks an arm behind his head. He bounces a little, ungainly and uncareful, until he’s facing Trevor again. “It’s Dina,” he says. “She’s lovely and she’s cute and all but she’s given the fuck up. I go in of a morning and she’s already doing her pretty little face and putting on her pretty little dress and, oh, Trevor my son, it’s arousing, don’t get me wrong, but there’s no resistance there any more. No—” he grinds his hips against the air, “—friction. Puts me right off my game, I don’t mind saying. But you…” The man pushes himself up, scattering pillows and cushions, and breathes whisky vapour in Trevor’s face. “You never gave up, did you? Oh, sure, you do your makeup and you wear what we tell you, but you’re still pushing against us. You even had a go, didn’t you? You even came at me.” He snorts. “It was pathetic. But, even then, you didn’t give up.” Jake leans closer still. “I bet you’re still thinking of trying to escape, aren’t you?”
“Jacob—”
He abruptly leans back again, staccato motion around quivering, unnerving stillness. “You are, aren’t you! You’re still thinking about escaping! You and Val-uh-rie. God.” He looks around, as if checking for cameras. “I should give her a go and all. What do you think? Man to man? Should I have a go? I mean, she’s hot, isn’t she? The old bat says Val’s in her fifties but I’d buy ten years younger. And I bet her arse is younger still. Know what I mean?” He nods to himself. “I’m going to give her a go. Callum wants to, the prick. He lusts after her. Watches her on the tapes when he thinks I can’t see. It’s disgusting, though, isn’t it? She’s old enough to be his mother. Well,” he adds, leaning forward again and flooding Trevor’s throat with another wave of stagnant air, “okay, maybe not his mother. Not unless she had him at fourteen, or something. And her dick’s a problem for that, I s’pose.” He snorts, flecks of phlegm coating his upper lip, and wiggles his pinkie finger. “Teeny tiny little problem, though, right?”
He should say something. He should fucking say something. There must be something he can say to end this!
But there isn’t, is there? He knows what this is leading to, he’s seen it, seen it at school, seen it outside clubs, helped stop it once, felt like a fucking hero, and now here he is, facing it down, facing him down, and he can’t move, can’t think, can barely speak. Jake’s blurring in his vision because he’s crying, because he’s too scared to do anything else.
A memory: Perry, his old partner, laughing, pontificating on the difference between real rape, and rape if she’s asking for it. “If she isn’t moving…” he used to say, and let silence finish for him.
Trevor should have fucking killed him for that.
“Oh, Theresa,” Jake says, grabbing suddenly at Trevor’s face, pawing at his cheek, running calloused fingers down his jaw, and the fear that’s paralysed Trevor intensifies. It’s been since morning that he shaved, and though he doesn’t grow much hair on his face, especially not since the castration and the injections, there’s still enough that by the evening it’s there to the touch if not to the eye, and Jake’s fingers are all over him.
The man’s flipping back and forth between calling him Trevor and Theresa, and what does that mean to him? How does Jake see him now?
And then the smile that crawls across Jake’s mouth confirms it: Jake expects this; Jake wants this; Jake needs to know that the person in front of him is neither man nor woman but captured plaything, and Trevor’s fulfilling every aspect of that awful desire for him.
He’s a toy.
Just like Valérie.
Just like the dead girls.
One hand on his face. The other plunging for his crotch.
Trevor hasn’t taken off his day clothes yet, so he’s still in the outfit he put on this morning. The one Valérie helped him with, because he followed a strange urge to look half-decent and wanted her advice on matching a knee-length skirt with a blouse, and now Jake’s pulling at it all, ripping at the buttons on the blouse, yanking at the skirt until the stitches pop, and Trevor comes the fuck alive, pushing back suddenly, hands on Jake’s shoulders, pushing and pushing and fucking pushing and hoping against hope that if the man loses his grip he’ll topple backwards and knock himself out on the wooden bedframe.
“Yes!” Jake spits, laughing, sneering. “This is more fucking like it! Come on, Theresa, my little girl, my fucking beauty, show me what you can do.”
Theresa can go for the fucking eyes, Trevor decides. And he’s almost fast enough. He gets a thumb against Jake’s cheek and the other even closer but then his wrists are bound, held in a sweaty, unbreakable grip. Jake’s laughing again, and now he pulls them both up off the bed, makes them stand unsteady. Walks them to the middle of the room and slowly forces Trevor’s hands behind his back. Holds them there, both wrists in one of Jake’s hands, and how is it possible that Trevor can’t break his hold? The bastard’s flat-out drunk!
Drunk, but still larger even than Trevor used to be, before he was brought here. Jake pushes on him again, forces him back until he slams painfully into the far wall. He feels himself press against it, feels his hands crushed against it as Jake’s full body weight traps him, and there’s nothing he can do but close his eyes and maybe try to bite Jake’s nose off if he gets the opportunity.
Jake’s hand slips under his skirt.
Best to not be here, if he can. Best to fade out.
And then there’s another slam, the door crashing into the wall hard enough to wake the dead, and Jake’s pulled violently away from him, thrown rough and sprawling to the floor.
“Trevor,” Callum says, standing in a ready stance equidistant between the two of them, breathing hard, “go to Val. I’ve unlocked her door. You don’t want to be alone after something like this. Go. Now.”
Trevor can’t move. He’s still trapped, still pressed against the wall, still waiting for the violation, still waiting for it to end. He’s looking and he’s looking and he’s looking but not seeing and all he can understand is that maybe Callum isn’t there after all, maybe he just hopes he is, maybe he needs to believe this isn’t happening so bad that—
“Trevor!” Callum yells. “Val’s room. Now. And don’t fucking look at me like that.”
Like what?
Like—?
Shit.
Fucking shit.
Trevor’s got it now. He’s got it and he moves like he wishes he had before, takes the wide path around Jake because the man’s stirring on the ground and glaring at the taser Callum’s got levelled at him, wondering what he can do, who he can hurt, and Trevor wants nothing more but to be away, to be locked behind another door, to be safe, but safety is a lie in this place, in this fucking charnel house, this abattoir, and why would he lie to himself like that? He’s trapped again, trapped in the moment, because when it ends oh god when it ends there’s going to be nothing left of him that he understands.
“Trevor!” Callum barks once more. “Seriously! Fuck off!”
Right.
Yeah.
Shit.
He falls back on protocol and snaps off a stupid little salute like he’s still in Peckinville, like he’s still the man he used to be, like he’s still got discipline worth shit, so it’s something when Callum, after a moment, returns it, before levelling his weapon once more at the man on the floor.
And that’s it. Trevor backs away, rounds the door frame, and when Valérie catches him in her arms he tries to push her away and almost succeeds before he realises.
It’s her.
It’s just her.
It’s just Val.
“I’ve got you,” she says. “Come stay with me. I’ve got you.”
She keeps her eyes on him as she locks the door behind them. Keeps her eyes on him as she props a chair under the handle. Keeps her eyes on him as she guides him to a place to sit, makes them both cups of something hot, adds a spot of liquor to each mug, bids him drink deeply.
He does so, and he remembers he has something to say to her. An apology. An apology she richly deserves because she’s put up with so much from him, helped him in every way she knows how.
But nothing comes out, no matter how hard he tries. Nothing but what feels like the last breath he’ll ever take.
2020 January 3
Friday
Beatrice dumps the morning coffee in front of her in a mug that says, FEE FI FO FEM (I’ll replace your blood with est-ro-gen), and Elle’s slow enough to wake that it takes her several seconds to get the joke. There are a lot of these bloody mugs around here, all of them with some kind of in-joke or reference cheaply printed on the side, and she’s already had to have some of the more obscure ones explained to her. Embarrassing but inevitable; she’s kept her distance from the Hall as a matter of habit and necessity, though more the former than the latter, these days, and she can hardly be faulted for failing to keep up with the local culture.
A nasty reminder, though, that for all she’s the reason Dorley Hall exists in its current form, she’ll never truly be a part of it. Difficult not to be envious when she sees the younger women running around in twos and threes, sharing easy camaraderie, while she is restricted to a spare flat on the second floor or, as with last night, a space in Beatrice’s bed, purchased with gin and compliments.
Her mother surfaces in her thoughts, as she often does, to scold her for not taking her due, by force when not freely given, and Elle irritably tries to forget her. She once told Beatrice that she feels haunted by the ghosts of her predecessors, that she feels torn between spitting their legacy back in their faces and apologising for failing to live up to it; that Beatrice did not immediately respond with something from the extensive list of genuine hardships that have characterised her life is, again, tribute to the strength of character one of them possesses and the other is always striving for.
She sits up in bed. It’s nice here. Even through the soundproofing in Beatrice’s flat, Dorley Hall has the same background hum of activity one might find in a hotel, but aimed in rather a more altruistic direction (if one stretches the definition of altruism just a tad). It pleases her to close her eyes and listen, and as she does so, two pairs of feet scamper past in the corridor; second years heading to the showers. Going there together, she notes, which suggests they woke up together. Whether as Sisters or as something more.
Elle has no siblings and no close friends save for those she retains, like Beatrice (even if the nature of her employment has shifted dramatically since their first meeting). Something else to envy.
She slurps at her coffee while Beatrice showers, and at the end of the cup her morning melancholy has largely been chased away. Company, family, in-jokes; daft things to regret the lack of, really, especially for one such as her: rich, titled and only just the wrong side of forty. Let the kids have their fun. They’ve more than earned it.
She swaps places with Bea, availing herself of her shower — it’s really quite good, but then it ought to be; it bloody well cost enough! — and slips her nightgown back on, unwilling to start the day quite yet. She returns to the bedroom with a towel around her head to find Beatrice frowning at a laptop and noisily drinking a coffee of her own. When she catches Elle trying to read the inscription, she holds it up:
Dorley’s Ironmongers
~Since 2004~
“We put the ‘fe’ in ‘male’!”
Yeah, that one’s obvious enough.
Elle lingers. The view from the window reminds of her home. Her real home, the place she hasn’t visited since she became both orphan and grand-orphan. Endless trees, frost-brittle and veiled in morning fog. If this were home, there’d be a secret place, somewhere only she knows about, a precious and quiet little grove she would find whenever she needed solitude. Whenever she needed somewhere to be someone other than Elle Lambert, daughter of immense privilege, heir to magnificent responsibility. A place that was spoiled, like everything else, by her adult discovery that it was where her grandfather preferred to bury the bones of his discarded acquisitions. She had them exhumed and discreetly sorted, but could not discover which remains, if any, belonged to Kelly.
Here at the Hall, the woods hide the two emergency exits from the lower floors; one relatively close by that leads to the first basement, and one deep in the woods that leads to the second. And the angle’s not perfect, but if she leans on the sill and squints, she can just about see the roof of one of the portacabins her people have been setting up around the nearer exit. She’s due a visit today; she’ll have to scold them for not having put up the camouflage netting yet.
Damn. If she’s going out there, she’ll have to borrow a pair of boots from one of the girls. Embarrassing. But she came here in a rush, a fire lit under her by the intelligence report, and operational practicalities and panicked phone calls were more urgent priorities than inventorying and shipping a suitable selection of travel- and footwear.
“How many more?” Beatrice asks, and Elle turns back to her, finds her looking up, her frown still very much in place. “How many more soldiers?”
“No more soldiers,” Elle says quickly, and laughs at herself. Almost twenty years on and still she hates to antagonise Beatrice, despite their respective positions. “I don’t want to drop a platoon on your heads, and I don’t believe I need to. A handful more staff still to come: medical, administrative. Two more installations. That’s all.”
“Two?”
Elle repeats herself. “Medical. Administrative.”
“Ah.”
“Are you annoyed with me, Beatrice?” she asks, and dislikes the pleading edge to her voice even as she is amused by it.
“I’m—” Bea starts, and then catches herself. Closes her laptop and smiles. It’s a rough smile, but it’s the effort that matters. “No. I’m annoyed with the situation. With Dorothy. And with the armed men setting up shop in my back garden. Not with you. I understand the need.”
“Armed women, actually,” Elle says, sitting on the other end of the bed from Bea. “Mostly, anyway. Our contingent had to be fully briefed, and it was the judgement of Jan and myself that the women in our ranks would respond more… positively to an explication of the programme here. Don’t worry, Beatrice, they are all bound by contract.” She shrugs. “Most of them found it quite interesting.”
It had helped that Jan, one of Elle’s most trusted assistants, had been the one to brief the soldiers, because she was able to draw on her own experiences at the Hall. Poor Jan fielded hours of questions, described the programme for them in detail, demonstrated for them the benefits and discussed with them the ethics of it all. The personal touch; an underrated component of the private military chain of command.
“It was still rather a messy afternoon,” Elle continues. “Exhausting.”
“Poor little rich girl,” Bea says, her smile broadening.
“Poor Jan,” Elle corrects, and then stretches, works the kinks out of her back and shoulders, and adds, “Poor me, too, though.”
“How is she?”
“Jan? Happy, as far as I can tell. Husband. They’re planning for children.”
“And you’re not…?”
Beatrice leaves the question hanging, so Elle answers in the firmest voice she can summon. “Absolutely not. One, she’s married. Two, she works for me. Give me some credit for growing up, Beatrice.”
She leaves it there, though she wants to go further, wants to confront and refute the idea from every possible angle, because she is emphatically not the woman she used to be, the woman Beatrice had to ask, with fear and determination in her voice, to leave the Hall, to cease her nights of leisure here. Oh, she never forced consent, but with hindsight and a good deal more wisdom, she’s certain there was a time one of the girls said yes solely because of who she was. It took her a long time to meet her own eyes in the mirror after she realised that.
Stupid girl: vowed to change the world; wound up becoming her grandfather. Doubly stupid because she really did have good intentions for the Hall, and there were enough tearaway lads on paths to become truly bad people to make it worth a shot. But she let her libido get in the way. Again and again.
When she left, she decided to emulate the girls. They come here to overcome their past selves, to face their souls in every sharp and violent aspect, to emerge changed, reborn; so should she. Sometimes she’s sure she succeeded.
Other times, such as now, faced with Beatrice in her bed, looking over at her with those bright, intelligent, sensual eyes, she wonders why she even bothered to try.
Christ.
Keep yourself in check, girl, for pity’s sake! Yes, she allowed you into her bed for one night, but this is her bloody home. Have some respect.
“Elladine?” Beatrice says. “Are you okay?”
Elle shrugs, both glad and irritated to have been noticed. No-one can read her like Beatrice can. “The usual,” she says. “Frustrated. Lonely. Desperately horny.”
She’s looked away to say this, preferring to study the intricacies of the wallpaper than personally witness being so intimately observed, and so it’s a surprise when the mattress shifts under her and Beatrice, laptop put away and coffee mug disposed of, lays a hand on Elle’s thigh.
“I thought once was enough,” Elle whispers.
Beatrice answers by flicking at the thin strap of Elle’s nightgown and pulling on the material, exposing her breasts and her back. Fingernails carve lightly into Elle’s spine and she follows them, turns on the bed and allows herself to enter Beatrice’s embrace. For her part, she slips her fingers under Bea’s camisole.
They kiss, and Elle lingers.
“Ugh,” Beatrice says, pulling away and wrinkling her nose, “you taste like coffee.”
“So do you,” Elle says, and kisses her again.
Beatrice leans back, and with a hand on Elle’s shoulder, guides her down. “Not everywhere,” she says.
* * *
* * *
They’re both woken by a loud thumping on Valérie’s door, and she’s closest — being that Trevor chose to sleep on what could be called her sofa only if one were feeling particularly charitable — so she kicks off the sheets and pulls on a robe and yanks at the door to find Callum, staring at the floor and with a nasty looking dark bruise on one side of his mouth. He doesn’t look up when she clears her throat, so she snaps her fingers a few times and, eventually, resorts simply to raising his head with her thumb under his chin.
He looks like shit.
“Callum,” she says shortly, “good morning. Lose any teeth?”
“Please,” he says. “I can take a punch.”
She heard Callum and Jacob going at it in the corridor last night. Jake was all mouth, called Callum all the worst names he could think of, and from the sound of it Callum put him down quite handily. But Callum’s bruised face suggests it wasn’t quite as easy as Valérie assumed. Drunk out of his mind or not, Jake presents a problem none of them seem to be able to solve.
“Good for you,” she says.
The curtains are still drawn and the only light in the room is from the front panel of her VCR, which makes the yellow sunlight flooding in from the corridor quite unpleasant. She looks back, checking on Trevor, and finds that he’s squinting towards the two of them at the door, so she smiles for Callum, places her palm on his chest, and walks him out into the corridor, shutting the door behind her.
“He’s not working today,” she says. “Dorothy can take it out of my hide if she wants, but he’s not—” she lowers her voice, “—as resilient as I am. No scar tissue,” she adds, as if Callum could possibly understand what she means.
“It’ll mean more work for you,” Callum replies, frowning.
Val shrugs. “Frances can help. Tell you what: why don’t we placate the very special boy upstairs, since I bet he’s still upset at you? We’ll make him a nice roast dinner, Frances and I. It’ll make him happy and put him to sleep. Should make everyone’s lives easier.”
“Jake’s not on duty today.”
“Oh?”
“The asset’s off-limits,” Callum says, and has the good grace to look a little guilty about it. Val’s glad she shut the door; Trevor does not need to hear himself described that way.
“Look, Callum,” she says. “I have not got into the habit of thanking people for things. I haven’t had the opportunity. But I don’t want to force darling Trevor to do it, so…” She leans up and kisses him on his other cheek, the one that isn’t bruised. “There’s your thanks.”
Callum, idiot that he is, puts a hand to his face and looks at her like she just ravished him.
“I’m, um…” He’s stammering a little, and it’s almost sweet, almost enough to make her forget that he works for the people who hold the key to her prison. “I’m glad you didn’t make Trevor do that.”
“Our secret,” she says.
When he’s gone — most likely to report to Dorothy on his successful mollification of the volatile French bitch — she flicks on a lamp and crouches down next to Trevor. He’s still lying on the sofa, still cocooned in borrowed sheets, and she rests the back of her hand carefully on his forehead. He smiles weakly, and she once again catches herself thinking how pretty he is.
He’ll never see it. Or, if he does, he’ll be disgusted by it.
“Trevor Darling,” she says, “how are you feeling?”
He blinks at her. “I’m not sure I know how to answer that.”
“Then don’t,” she replies briskly, and stands up from her crouch. “You have a choice: appalling instant coffee here, or quite good coffee in the kitchen. You don’t have to work today, but I imagine you’d prefer to have company.”
“Yeah,” he says, sitting up, “I’d like to be near you, if possible.”
“Then come,” she says, beckoning him, “and I will dress you. And don’t give me that look; there are some things that are not optional.”
“Val?” he says, catching her turning away. “Thank you.”
“I merely gave you a place to sleep and a locked door. Thank Callum. Except don’t; I already thanked him on your behalf.” And she mimes the kiss she gave him.
“Oh,” Trevor says. “Uh. Thanks. That must have been… Thanks.”
“See?” Val says. “I told you my job was worse than yours.”
* * *
“Do you miss my little soldier?”
Elle’s wrapping a light scarf around her neck while gazing idly out of the window in Beatrice’s office, and she wonders for a moment if she misheard, but looking around she finds Bea leaning against the frame of the door that connects office to living room and smiling broadly, apparently still in a playful mood.
So she finishes with her scarf and strides quickly across the office to take Beatrice’s hands in hers, and says in the most sultry voice she can conjure, “How could I, when its replacement is even more inviting?” It’s the truth, too. She’s well aware that Dorley’s traditional customers valued what they saw as the marks of manhood left on the girls they procured, the better to humiliate and fetishise them, but Elle’s never been drawn to one set of genitals over another. What’s enticing is the woman’s relationship to her body, to her history, not the exact configuration of her sex.
Beatrice’s smile deepens, and then she leans in, kisses Elle quickly on the lips, and pulls away. “Flirt,” she says.
“What brought this on?” Elle asks, as Beatrice starts throwing things — phone, tablet, pens — into a shoulder bag, still smiling, still acting as if she might at any moment reach out and resume their intimacy. And it’s not like her to linger on the moments they share together.
Bea nods her head at the window. “Them,” she says, meaning, no doubt, the Peckinville people who’ve been setting up shop in the woods. “It’s been a long time since we had more than two of your lads—”
“—mostly women, this time, remember—”
“—on the grounds, and it brings back memories. I’m nostalgic. And, perhaps, regressing a little, to a time when pleasure came more easily.” Bea stops, slings the bag over her shoulder, and frowns at Elle, her mood suddenly flattening. “I never did work out what you see in us.”
They’ve spoken of it hundreds of times. It’s almost a game; Beatrice always trying to catch her out, to uncover the physicality at the base of Elle’s altruism. Elle’s never hidden her preferences, but she’s always tried to emphasise that they are far from the entirety of her motivation.
“Rebirth,” she says. “Resilience. And,” she adds, smiling, “I must confess, just a touch of unsavoury interest.”
Beatrice laughs. “Unsavoury? You? I never would have guessed.” She seems momentarily so buoyant that Elle wants to reach for her again, but then Beatrice’s shoulders slump and her melancholy returns.
“Bea?” Elle says gently. “Beatrice? What is it, really?”
There’s a silence that drags on for far too long, and then Beatrice dumps her bag on the desk, leans on its edge, and says, “Declan. My fault. I washed him out, which is bad enough, and then—” she claps her hands together, “—bang, suddenly fucking Dorothy Marsden has him. Dorothy! Of all people!”
Bea turns a glare on Elle, who doesn’t even try to deflect it. Almost twenty years they’ve been working on turning Dorley Hall from a house of horrors to a functional — if highly specialised — rehabilitation centre, and she knows Bea is sometimes of the opinion that they haven’t gone far enough. The washouts weigh heavily on her.
“It was bad enough when I thought it was just you getting your claws into him, but Dorothy? How is he? Did your people get a look at him?”
Elle nods. “He was the show-room exhibit. Topped and tailed, they said. Dorothy was most precise in her retelling. They left quite nauseous.”
“Shit.” She prods herself in the chest with a thumb. “My fault.”
Elle sits on the desk next to her, dangling her legs over the edge and hesitatingly taking Bea’s hand. She doesn’t resist. “My people, remember,” she says. “I’m the one who lost him.”
“Fat lot of good it does him, either way. And yet…”
“Yeah,” Elle says. She knows what Bea’s not saying, because she knows what Declan did. They’ve both seen the file. Probably read it cover to cover multiple times, salving their conscience. None of them have much room in their hearts for rapists, but there’s a difference between justice and a life even more cruel and unusual than the one she had planned for him.
At least the girl’s okay. The girl he abused, made his own, the girl who seemed unable to tear herself from him, for reasons Elle finds unfathomable. The girl. Take her away from him, ply her with friends and community, and she’s a new woman. Hardly even talks about him any more, Elle understands. They’re waving a higher education bursary at her and encouraging her to take a foundation year and getting her counselling and she’s doing okay.
“We can’t leave him with her,” Bea says.
“You’re right. But we have to. For now.”
“Elle—”
“I’m sorry, Beatrice, but it’s just not practical. It’s not safe. I burned a major asset just confirming the rumours about Stenordale, and I don’t have anything else even remotely on that level ready for another shot. Especially since another nibble at her unseemly little fishing hook would probably raise suspicions. Doubly so when the last lot don’t come up with the funds they promised her. She’ll vet any interested parties all the harder.”
“You know what she’s doing to him.”
Elle squeezes Bea’s hand. “I know,” she says. Beatrice makes an unhappy noise, so Elle shrugs, and adds, “Tell you what. I have some people in the area. I can have a couple of them swing by in a few days. Not to knock on the door or anything, but just to hang around for a while. Try to get an idea of force strength. They can pose as ramblers or something.” She’s trying to make the idea sound improvised; in truth, it’s a plan that’s been sitting ready until someone judges it either sufficiently safe or sufficiently necessary. “But all they can do is look, Bea. From afar. You know how big Stenordale is; you could house fifty people there and still have empty rooms.”
“I know,” Bea says.
“He’s not there forever.”
“I know. But it’s the manner in which he eventually leaves that concerns me.” Beatrice takes a deep breath and shakes her head. “No matter. What about your missing man; you think he’s there?”
“He could be,” Elle says. “Then again, he could be in any one of a number of Silver River facilities.”
“Or,” Bea says, “Dorothy could have had him topped and tailed, too.”
“Don’t,” Elle says. Trevor Darling’s file hasn’t left her list of open documents since he went missing, and she’s looked long and hard at his pictures. It’s long since occurred to her that someone like Dorothy, always on the lookout for new amusement, would see his potential; she’s just been hoping Beatrice wouldn’t think of it. The woman wears her guilt so extravagantly.
“It’s a possibility,” Bea says quietly. “You know it is.”
“Well,” Elle says, “if it’s happened, we’ll get him straightened out. See if your Mrs Prentice can do something for him.”
“He’ll never be the same. That’s the whole point.”
Elle closes her eyes. “None of us are, Bea,” she says.
* * *
They arrive at Dorley Hall and Amy deliberately doesn’t let them in, doesn’t let Rachel know she’s been judged trustworthy and put on the security system, because that’s exactly the kind of thing that might set her off, and she spent the whole bloody car ride over simmering, pushing down her anger, being Rachel, and while it made Amy smile when she first saw it because it reminded her so much of how they used to be — Amy the inquisitive one, Shahida the intuitive one and Rachel the too bloody clever by half one — it also put her on edge, too. She spent a lot of time managing Rachel’s moods after Melissa disappeared and Shahida mostly followed her, and while it’s more or less instinctive at this point, it’s not exactly pleasant, not when Rachel gets a bee in her bonnet. Worse, when Rachel gets a tirade going and Amy finds herself lost for words, unable to counter it.
Charlie, Nadine and Indira are all in the kitchen, supervising the second years in something culinary — probably the early stages of the not-exactly-formal lunch Amy’s been invited to — but it’s Tabitha who spots them first, jogging down the main stairs and almost colliding with them in her haste. They exchange greetings and, minus Rachel, a quick hug — Tabitha’s in exercise clothes that, quite incidentally, show a lot of skin, and Amy feels her pulse quicken on contact — and then Tabitha lets them all in, grabs a handful of cereal bars and vanishes in the direction of what Amy understands is the stairway to the basement.
“Hi, Amy,” Nadine says, and Charlie, Indira and several second years echo her a moment later.
Amy waves. “Hi!”
“How many of them do you know?” Rachel whispers to her.
“I don’t know! It was a big party and I didn’t count. And don’t be so bloody rude.” Amy raises her voice and addresses the rest of the kitchen, most of whom have stopped what they’re doing to look at them both. “Sorry about my friend,” she says. “I’m just going to deliver her to a nice, comfy chair in the dining hall and then I’ll be back for some coffee or something for both of us.”
“I’ll bring you some,” Faye says. “And some breakfast, if you want anything.”
“What do you think, Rach?” Amy asks. “Can you stand to eat something prepared here?”
“Fuck off, Amy,” Rachel says, and starts off for the dining hall without her.
“Whatever’s handy’d be lovely,” Amy says to Faye, and follows Rachel out, catching up with her and steering her towards a handful of armchairs set up around a coffee table in one corner. “What is wrong with you?” she hisses.
“Absolutely nothing,” Rachel snaps back.
They sit in silence.
How can she get through to Rachel? Indira made it clear to Amy that her friend is skating on very thin ice indeed, that if she does anything that even looks suspicious, the Hall is likely to respond with lawyers first, and escalate from there. And Amy said, isn’t that a bit harsh, and Indira replied, not if you have almost a hundred vulnerable and highly minoritised people to protect. And Amy said, yah, point.
But Rachel isn’t going to be persuaded with threats. The allusions that were made on the day they both found everything out were almost enough to set her off, and it had probably been due only to the literally everything else that got dropped on them that had distracted her, caused her instead to start laying into Pippa rather than responding with legal threats of her own. Because Rachel isn’t without resources and she’s not without courage, and while as a whole the Hall undoubtedly has her outgunned by an order or two of magnitude and a decent helping of ruthlessness, Amy’s certain they wouldn’t be able to shut her down before she comprehensively wrecked at least some of their shit.
She’ll be an incredible ally, she told Indira, if she can be persuaded. And so they’re all holding back, playing nice, pretending like she didn’t say the awful things she did, so Amy can try to manage her without seeming like she’s managing her.
If only Shy hadn’t sent that email or left that voicemail message. Amy knows the whole story now, knows how the entire mess went down, and she can’t help but think the Hall and everyone in it would be a bit more secure if Shahida had been just a little less… Shahida. Yes, Amy wouldn’t know, and that would be a tragedy for a hundred reasons, but maybe Melissa could have brought her onside quietly.
“What am I doing here, Amy?” Rachel asks.
“You tell me. You’re the one who called this morning.”
“That’s because I’m losing my mind over this, Amy! And, believe me, if there were anyone else I could talk to about this, I would.” Rachel folds her arms, sits back in the voluminous armchair. “But there isn’t. I can’t even talk to Belinda because she’d immediately call the police. I’m still not sure why I haven’t yet.”
“Because—”
“Yes, I know, because Shy’d get in trouble.”
“Melissa, too,” Amy points out.
“Yeah, I guess.”
“Anyway,” Amy says, “we’re here because I was already meeting some friends and I didn’t want to fart around with you one place and them another. And we’re here—” she indicates their little corner of the room, “—so we can talk out your shit without anyone who is likely to be affected overhearing, while at the same time showing you just how bloody ordinary these people are. Look!” She points discreetly. At a table in the rough centre of the dining hall, Maria and Edy are chatting and eating breakfast over a laptop and a sheaf of papers. “Just normal people, eating normal cereal. Normally.”
Maria spots them and waves. Amy waves back.
“Amy,” Rachel says, “you’re not going to get me to hug a prison guard by showing me he pets his dog.”
Amy nods. She doesn’t note that Rachel chose to gender her hypothetical prison guard male, just as she doesn’t say out loud that Rachel passed through the kitchen practically cringing away from the bodies of the second-year girls milling about. There’s something to unpick there, and Amy’s starting to wonder if it has anything to do with Rachel’s reticence even to talk about Melissa lately.
Didn’t Shahida say Rachel was suspicious of Liss from day one? Picking holes in her story from the start? And, okay, it’s not like her story wasn’t bollocks, but she and Shy told it earnestly and it was, from what Amy understands, more sort of spiritually true. And who does that? Who looks such a beautiful, blonde gift horse right in the bloody mouth?
She’s roused from her thoughts by Faye, tapping over on her fashionable little one-inch heels and setting down a tray on the coffee table. Catching Amy looking at her shoes, Faye says, “You like them?”
“Faye,” Amy says, projecting as much seriousness as she can manage, “I covet them. You might have to lock your door tonight.”
“You know they lock us in,” Faye replies, matching Amy’s tone.
“Where did you get them?” Amy asks, ignoring Rachel’s sharp intake of breath.
“Paige,” Faye says. “I don’t normally wear heels, not since… you know.” Amy nods; she talked fashion with some of the second years her first evening here, after Shahida took Rachel away for everyone’s own good. Faye told her about her old sponsor, and how the blow-up that led to her coming under Indira’s expansive wing happened, at least in part, because of a pair of inappropriate shoes. “But Paige is just so persuasive. And she has a large collection of shoes in my size.”
“Are you happy?” Rachel asks suddenly, interrupting the half-formed thought Amy was about to express and leaving her floundering.
Faye’s voice hardens. “What?”
“Are you happy?” Rachel repeats. “You say they lock you in. Do you think that helps?”
“Who are you, again?” Faye says.
“Rachel Gray-Wallace.”
“Oh. Shahida’s other friend.” Faye nods. “You’re the one who called Pippa a rapist.”
“I didn’t—”
“‘Are you happy?’ What kind of a question is that?”
Rachel scowls. “The kind of question you ask someone who was kidnapped and mutilated.”
“Uh—” Amy says.
“What is wrong with you?” Faye says, twisting on her heel and storming off.
“Everyone keeps asking me that,” Rachel mutters.
“Yeah,” Amy says, having successfully unglued her brain, “that’s because you keep saying incredibly awful things. Jesus, Rach! Why are you so determined to see monsters here?”
“Why are you so determined not to?”
“Because I talked to them!” Amy yells, losing her self-control. Her voice rasps and she starts coughing, feeling like something’s lodged in her throat. Probably Rachel’s stubborn insistence on adhering to conventional morality. As if conventional morality ever made space for women like the ones she’s met here!
Rachel glares at her, not replying, so Amy glares right back. She’s got no way forward here, no ideas, no plan ever since look how normal they are, isn’t it neat got thrown back in her face, and no more patience. She’s tempted to storm out, to follow Faye — to check on Faye, too, for all that she left for a kitchen full of her Sisters — and she’s wondering what would happen if she did just that, if she left Rachel to bloody well stew, when a hand closes over her shoulder.
Amy doesn’t jump, but Rachel does, and Amy wonders for a moment if Rach was tunnel-visioning on her so hard that she didn’t see anyone approach, or if she’s just reacting to being in the presence of another Dorley girl.
“Everything okay?” Jane asks.
Amy leans her head back, jams it into the cushion, looks at Jane from underneath. “I have no bloody idea,” she says. “Probably not, on balance.”
“Who’s this?” Rachel says.
“God, Rach! You’re so rude.”
“This,” Jane says, squeezing Amy’s shoulder for a moment, “is Jane.” She doesn’t extend a hand, which is funny to Amy because it was the first thing she did when they met on New Year’s, and instead nudges Amy with her hip. Amy gets the message after a moment and shifts over, and Jane squeezes herself into the armchair.
Rachel stares at them, frowning.
“This isn’t going well,” Amy says.
“She means,” Rachel says, “that she’s failed to persuade me that your little operation here isn’t… horrific.”
“Yeah, well,” Jane says, “it kind of is. Ames, is this in danger of becoming a thing?”
Amy nods gloomily. “A whole bloody thing.”
“Maria showed me the video from disclosure. And Faye just told the whole kitchen about what she said just now. So there’s probably a debate going on about what to do next.” Jane tilts her head towards Maria and Edy’s table, which has acquired a couple of other sponsors, all talking in whispers. “I thought I’d come have a go. See if I can get through to her.”
“A good start,” Rachel says, “would be to stop talking about me as if I’m not here.”
“Would it?” Jane says brightly. “Would it, indeed? I’m sorry, have I been impolite?”
“Frankly—”
“As impolite as you were just now to Faye, do you think?”
“I wasn’t—”
“You treated her more like the subject of a scientific experiment than a person. She told us all about it. ‘Do you think that helps?’” Jane’s impression of Rachel isn’t bad; Amy gives it a seven. “That’s not a question you ask in good faith, Rachel. That’s a question you ask when you’re preparing to refute whatever the answer is. Come on; you’re a smart woman. You know how you’re coming across.”
“How I’m coming across?” Rachel sputters. “I was dragged into this fucking place on the second to last day of the year to be told that a friend I thought was dead and then thought had a slightly weird gender transition was, in fact, forcibly reassigned in an underground prison, and that my other friend is happily going along with it! I’ve been pulled into your insane nightmare and you think I’m coming across poorly?”
“Well, yeah,” Jane says. “You know why you were brought in: Melissa and Shahida weren’t careful. They involved you. And so we stepped in, because you needed to know how important it is that Melissa’s new identity remains, broadly, a secret. And so did Amy, but the difference between the two of you, it seems to me, is that Amy listened.”
“Amy’s always been prone to—”
“Careful, Rach,” Amy says, in part because she suddenly very much does not want to hear what Rachel thinks of her. What she might have thought of her all along.
“Amy, they’re— they’re— Fuck!”
Rachel gives up, unable to articulate herself in the face of Amy’s increasingly obvious upset and Jane’s deliberately focused interest. She flops back instead, and stares at her untouched breakfast.
Amy, reminded, fetches her coffee and takes a sip. Something nice and solid to hold on to.
“Hey, Amy,” Jane says quietly, “remember the story I told you? About the thing? On the tube?”
Amy nods, frowning, slurping distractedly, feeling suddenly cold and exposed, because she doesn’t want Jane to share it, doesn’t want Jane to feel like she has to. Doesn’t want to sully it with Rachel’s disapproval. She thinks back to her first night at the Hall, when Paige refused to pander to Rachel’s indignation, and how at the time Amy thought her precisely correct.
But perhaps, sometimes, it’s the right approach. Perhaps, when you have nothing else, you really do need to expose your weakest self, and hope empathy carries the day, hope you haven’t handed someone a weapon to use against you.
But she still doesn’t want Jane to share the story, because it’s special to her in a way she’s not sure she’ll ever tell Rach at this rate. In the early hours of New Year’s Day, Amy and Liss and Shy and most of the first-year sponsors decamped to the third-floor common room, and the Dorley contingent graciously answered every drunken question Amy could think of. They told her their secrets. They let her in. And then the quiet corner she’d claimed with Jane became quieter still until it was just the two of them, and Jane kissed her again and told her the story, and the girl who had simply been there at the stroke of midnight, who’d shared with her a friendly kiss to mark the new year, became the girl who opened herself up for Amy, because she was interested, because she promised not to judge, and maybe a little because Amy kissed her back.
She’d never kissed a girl before.
Jane tells the story, deftly intercepting Rachel’s hostility as she goes, and Amy leans against her and thinks of everything else from that night, everything Rachel doesn’t get to see.
When Jane was a boy, the story goes, she was thin like a reed and wore cheap glasses that always needed repairing and lifted cans of beans duct-taped together because she wanted dumbbells but couldn’t afford them. She ran with a group of boys from her school, boys who played football and rugby and revelled in their boyhood, in the ugly things that were implicitly permitted, in the taboo things they coveted and sometimes stole for themselves. She’d grown up around them, had known little but their company.
“The pressure is overwhelming,” she’d said, as Amy locked arms around her waist and softly nibbled at her neck, up there in the third-floor common room. “If you don’t conform, if you don’t do the things they do, then you’re not one of them, you’re the other thing, the thing everyone’s supposed to despise. And if you’re not strong, if you’re not confident, if you’re most of the way to not being like them already, then you have to go further, just to show them. Just so they won’t turn on you.”
The story, for all the buildup Jane gives it — now, telling Rachel, and upstairs, whispering it between wet breaths — could be thought of as anticlimactic. The boy Jane used to be stepping away from his friend group and pinching a woman’s bottom. Calling her a slut. Trapping her, taking advantage of the enclosed space of the train carriage. Grinning down at her and doing his best to be intimidating while the lads behind him laugh and egg him on, support him, elevate him.
“It’s so ordinary, isn’t it?” she’d said. “A woman getting her arse pinched on the tube or the bus or somewhere. Just another one of those little intrusions. Sexual assaults so mundane that sometimes you don’t even tell anyone about them. It’s happened to me. Most girls I know, too. But it wasn’t the moment that stuck with me, Amy. It was when I saw her on the platform after. She moved off down the carriage from us, obviously, but she got off at the same stop as me, and only a couple of the other boys did, too, so we weren’t such a crowd any more, and I saw her, and she saw me, and I knew it wasn’t worth it. I knew I’d balanced my scales by taking from hers. It was a single, perfect, awful moment of clarity.”
“What did you do after that?” Amy’d asked, expecting something redemptive. And that was when Jane began properly to cry.
“I blamed her. I fucking blamed her, Amy. I felt miserable and guilty and stupid and cruel, and I let it poison me. Because that’s what it was like. When you’re a teenage boy, when you’re the kind of teenage boy I was, in the environment I was in, with my friends and my dad and my brothers, you can’t stop to think, because thinking… it’s so fucking dangerous, Amy. So I took all my guilt and I put it on her and I hated her. It was so easy to do. So easy. She was that bitch. I got so angry. For such a long time.”
In the early hours of New Year’s Day they’d kissed some more, without passion but with fondness and with care, and as she fell asleep on the other side of Jane’s bed that morning Amy tried to remember a single time any of the men she’d dated had been so vulnerable in front of her, so trusting.
Rachel listens. She’s stopped asking questions. But she’s leaning forward again, and seems more open, and Amy hopes it’s enough, because she can feel through her shoulder that Jane’s shaking just a little.
“The Hall saved me from all that,” Jane says. “I didn’t assault any other women, but eventually I came here to study and they saw me glowering in the corridors and saying awful things and they looked into what I was like online and that was it. If misogyny is a river then I was swimming in it. If it’s an ocean, I couldn’t see land. And they just came and scooped me up and made me so, so angry, and also a little bit relieved, because I didn’t have to prove myself any more. Didn’t have to be a man any more. Didn’t have to be horribly, constantly aware of how fucking bad at it I was. Because that’s kind of the thing, Rachel: people won’t shut up about what victims boys are. Boys are being outperformed at school; boys are deprived of healthy role models; boys are losing their place in modern society. And so on. But no-one talks about the actual problem with boys: that we make them into boys. Boys are told that emotions are weakness, that strength is everything, that any hint of homosexuality or womanhood is a death sentence, and then we send them out into the world, as children, to violently police each other. To police themselves. And it’s not enough to tell them otherwise, because the entire world wants to contradict you. You have to pull them out of it.” She sits back, runs a hand through her hair. “So that’s what I do now. I look for boys who are the way I was, who are hurting themselves and hurting other people, and I pull them out. Make them see what I saw. And once you’re free of it, it’s easy to see the lies and contradictions for yourself. The concrete shell around the house of cards just—” she flicks a finger in mid-air, “—falls away, and the cards follow, one by one.”
Jane’s voice has been growing more hoarse as she talks, so Amy passes over her half-finished coffee and Jane drinks, smiles in thanks, and together they wait for Rachel’s response.
It’s a long time coming.
“Okay,” Rachel says, standing up from her chair. “Okay. Right. Okay.” She’s gathering her things, all the while looking everywhere but at Jane and Amy. “I’m going to do you the courtesy of not reacting right now. I’m going to find somewhere quiet, somewhere else, and think about what you said.” She nods at Jane, meeting her eyes at last. “Thank you.”
“You’re not going to tell anyone, are you?” Amy says as Rachel passes. “You’ll keep quiet?”
“I’ll keep quiet,” Rachel says.
Amy persists. “It’s important. It’s for Melissa, for Steph, for Shahida, for—”
“I’ll keep it to myself. Won’t even tell Belinda. I promise. Have a nice lunch, Amy. Jane.”
Neither of them exhales until Rachel’s out of the room, and then Jane’s leaning full-body against Amy, spent, more affected than Amy thought. It’s one thing, she supposes, to tell everything to someone like Amy, on an intimate night, loosened by alcohol and the company of friends; quite another to tell a hostile stranger over a coffee while you wait for her to throw it in your face.
Feeling like maybe she shouldn’t, that perhaps it was just a New Year’s thing, but wanting to comfort her anyway, Amy kisses Jane on the cheek, and Jane freezes for a moment and then nuzzles against her, still shaking but smiling again and returning Amy’s affection with a kiss to the end of her nose.
“Thanks,” Jane says.
“Thank you,” Amy says. “She’s my problem.”
“She’s all of our problem. You think she won’t tell anyone?”
“She won’t,” Amy says, and with all her heart, wills herself to believe it.
* * *
The dark-haired girl with the attitude and the adorable little car pulls out of the car park by the lake at such speed that Elle worries for a moment that the Beetle will tip over on the corner, but she makes it to the main road without incident. Elle would follow her halfway home just in case, since she still seems to be driving somewhat erratically, but she doesn’t have access to any cameras outside the university — not from here, anyway — so she’ll just have to hope she makes it home okay. Even if, for security reasons, it might be better for them all if she didn’t.
An unworthy thought; one of many, lately. Why can’t people just leave her girls alone? And why go to such depths of moral opprobrium for men?
She’ll never understand these younger Millennials.
“Shall I put someone on her?” she asks, passing the tablet back to Beatrice. “Just in case?”
“Goodness, no,” Bea says. “We’re trying to persuade her we’re not evil.”
“Ah. Well. Good luck to us, then.” People can be so tiresomely didactic.
A second breakfast of sorts — pastries, mostly — and yet more coffee had given Elle and Beatrice an ideal vantage point from which to observe another of the Hall’s little dramas playing out, while keeping them mostly hidden behind a larger cluster of sponsors and hangers-on in the centre of the dining hall. A good thing, too: had that girl, Rachel, come charging over with the intent of handing over a piece of her mind, Elle would have been extremely tempted to refuse it, and press onto her a piece of her mind as a considerably more helpful replacement. And Beatrice does so hate it when Elle yells.
Beatrice nudges her, and Elle looks over to see the outsider girl, Amy, and the sponsor, Jane, standing up and heading for the stairs together. Elle wants nothing more than to borrow the tablet right back and follow them up the stairs, but they’re late for their meeting with Jan and, anyway, Elle can’t disguise that desire even to herself as coming from anything other than prurience. It’s the kind of habit she’s supposed to have left in her twenties.
She does hope they work something out, though. It’s wonderful when the girls find love.
Hmm. Living vicariously through the recipients of her professional largesse. Again. Not especially healthy, Elladine.
She makes a mental note to ensure Jane is compensated adequately enough that, should she and Amy Woodley wish to step out together, they will not be financially restricted, and allows herself to be guided to her feet by Beatrice. She smiles at Maria and the other girls currently brunching with her, and follows Bea through the corridors at the back of the Hall and out through the glass doors of the conservatory. There’s little paving out here, and civilisation gives way to the wilds remarkably quickly, but she is at least well-equipped; Maria had several options in a comfortable size seven, and thus Elle stomps out across the frost-hardened ground in a satisfyingly sturdy pair of Doc Martens in cherry red.
It’s only a little more than three minutes across the uneven and treacherous ground, but by the time they find the exit from basement two, the carefully salted dirt road out and the smattering of portacabins, it feels as if Dorley Hall and the university could be a mile away. Jan, her girl here, dressed for the weather and the job but still unable completely to hide her charm, trips as she rushes out of the main office cabin to greet them. Elle’s briefly confused, since Jan is usually so poised, until she remembers that the girl retains a habitual deference to Beatrice that she never quite developed for Elle.
“Ms Lambert!” Jan squeaks, several registers higher than usual. “Aunt Bea!”
“Good morning, Jan!” Elle replies, stepping forward to shake her hand and, incidentally, to offer moral and physical support. Jan’s knees appear to be knocking.
“Jan,” Beatrice says warmly, standing back and smiling. “Wonderful to see you.”
“Aunt Bea,” Jan repeats.
“Please call me Beatrice. Or Bea. Or Ms Quinn, if you really must.”
Jan nods vigorously. Her other arm, the one not cradled in Elle’s hands, is ramrod-straight at her side. Those early intakes were a tad rough. Jan’s been so down-to-earth in her endeavours for Elle, and even during the (brief) planning of this operation; remarkable to watch the decade-plus between her intake and now fall away, to see her become wary again, terrified to cause offence.
Bea sees it, doesn’t she? Elle glances back, and Bea meets her eyes. Yes. Of course she sees it.
“Jan,” Bea says, “if you’d like to speak to Ms Lambert in your… office, there, I will inspect the site.”
“Yes, of course,” Jan says, with barely a gap between words.
Inside the office, which is larger than Elle expects — these portable installations always are — Jan relaxes, leans against a filing cabinet and tries to look like nothing just happened.
“Jan,” Elle says quietly, “are we alone?” Jan nods. “You don’t need to worry about Beatrice. She’s not here to judge you, and she no longer has authority over you. In fact, outside the walls of the Hall, you outrank her.”
Jan wheezes for another second or two before answering. “I know. I do. I don’t know why I’m so antsy around her. I didn’t expect to be.”
“It was a difficult time for you. Let’s not dwell, shan’t we? How’s Robert?”
Breaking out into a broad smile that only at its edges betrays the nerves that still cause her occasionally to shudder, Jan says, “Oh, he’s fine. A friend of his is having top surgery soon, so he’s taking the opportunity. Flying out with him, et cetera.”
Elle nods. She knew of this; Robert bought the ticket on Jan’s company laptop. She’s already planned a concomitant increase to Jan’s bonus, so she won’t be out of pocket. She keeps up the small talk as Jan takes her through the operational developments of the last two days: nothing unexpected. The medical staff arrive this afternoon with the last of the installations, and the last administrator, tomorrow morning. They have taps into the Hall’s power and enough water for showers of a length that qualifies, she says, as decadent. Elle prompts her about the missing camouflage netting; this evening, Jan says.
“We’ll be an invisible little hamlet by nineteen-hundred.”
“Well done,” Elle says, and makes a show of inspecting the office space. “You’re happy in the trailer?”
Jan shrugs, smiling. “It’s fine. And it’s only for a month, after all.”
One month is the time they’ve allowed themselves properly to assess the situation at Stenordale Manor, to decide if the Hall is under threat, to verify the locations of Dorothy Marsden and Declan Shaw, to probe further for sightings of Trevor Darling, and to thus decide if the installation in the woods needs to become something more permanent or if it can be quietly dismantled.
“You’re quite welcome to stay at the Hall,” Beatrice says, entering the office.
“Oh,” Jan says, “ah, um, no, thank you, Aunt Bea.”
“Well. The offer’s open. Ms Lambert, I believe we should be on our way? I’m happy enough with the disposition of the trailers and the portacabins and such.” She waves a disinterested hand. “And you said something about hiding them so they can’t be seen from above…?”
“Tonight,” Elle says. “We’ll do some drone flybys and send you the footage. Nobody’ll know we’re here.”
“Unless they decide to go rambling,” Bea says pointedly, presumably reminding Elle of her earlier promise.
“Quite. Well, Jan, we’ll leave you to it.”
“Um,” Jan says, “actually, there was one thing…”
“Hmm?” Bea says, and then laughs softly when Jan tries to reply and instead half-swallows some saliva. “Oh, relax, child,” she adds over Jan’s frantic coughing. “I’m not half the harridan I pretend to be. Ask your question.”
Jan nods, massaging her chest and breathing carefully. “I just wanted to ask,” she says, hoarse but a little more confident, “if Tabitha still works here.” Her words are coming out quickly again. “It’s been a long time and we haven’t kept in touch, but I’ve been thinking of her lately and I wanted to see if, maybe, she wanted to meet for coffee or something, and—”
“Tabitha’s still here,” Beatrice says kindly, cutting her off before she runs out of oxygen. “I’ll let her know you asked after her. You might well find her showing up at your door sooner rather than later.”
The pleasantries required to extricate themselves from her presence go more smoothly than their introduction, and Jan waves at them from the office door as they leave, stepping carefully off the temporary paving and back onto the dirt.
“Thank Maria for these boots, won’t you, Beatrice?” Elle says once they’re finished waving. “I’ll have them cleaned and returned to her.”
“You can thank her yourself.”
“Ah, no. I should get out of your hair.”
“Yes,” Beatrice says, “but perhaps I enjoy having you in my hair.”
Elle snorts. “Likewise, but I have responsibilities that cannot be fulfilled from the Hall.”
“Maybe you should set up an office here.”
“You know the story. I can’t be seen here too much.”
“I know,” Beatrice says, frowning. “It’s just that I’ve become rather used to the company. Everyone else is so… young.”
“Why, thank you,” Elle says drily.
“You know what I mean. And there’s Maria, of course, but she’s busy, and she has Edith now. I don’t like to intrude.” Bea sighs, stops walking, looks up at the morning sky, the greying clouds, the promise of rain. “I’m becoming old, Elle. Old and alone. I don’t like it. And with the soldiers, with Dorothy— I keep thinking of her.”
“Oh, Beatrice.”
“I know. I’m being foolish.”
“Valérie might still be out there, Beatrice. We might yet find her.”
Bea shakes her head. “At this point,” she says, “I’d almost rather we didn’t. The thought of her trapped somewhere. Trapped for decades… It’s the stuff of nightmares.”
2020 January 4
Saturday
It’s the dichotomy of her that gets to him. The way she walks into the security room as if she owns the place, as if everyone in it — him included — is beneath her; and yet she’s controlled, directed, her path in life confined more than anyone else he’s ever known, ever met, ever heard of. She can’t leave the manor. Can’t even take a sick day.
And, yes, there’s the other dichotomy of her. Because she’s technically a man, and still is, somewhere under that skirt. But you wouldn’t know it to look at her or talk to her, and if she thought she could get away with it she’d hurt you for so much as suggesting it.
Still she walks like she’s daring him to give her an order. It’s hypnotic.
His cheek tingles where she kissed him.
Jake would say he’s spent too much time cooped up at Stenordale Manor, which is true — a week’d be too much time in this stuffy old shithole — and that he’s forgotten what a real woman looks like. Mind, he’d say that while preening over his abused and altered toy, his gift from Ms Marsden, and he’d also say something like, any hole’s a goal. Because he’s a piece of shit.
A piece of shit who took a good swing at Callum. A reward for saving him from Ms Marsden’s wrath. Because that’s why he did it: so no-one broke the rules, so Ms Marsden doesn’t call in more people from Silver River, so the two of them don’t get replaced on the most plum assignment he’s ever had. They agreed, come the morning, not to put it in the log, so Jake doesn’t have to face another bloody enquiry and Callum doesn’t get sent off somewhere else, somewhere he might get shot at.
When he puts it like that, he can almost believe it.
The bastard Jake is right: he’s too soft for this job. Like Trevor. But what’s the point of it? Even Val said it: his conscience, whatever form it might take, is useless to her.
“Thanks,” he mutters when Val drops a cup of coffee and a sandwich in front of him. Breakfast in the security office at Stenordale: the lap of luxury. He wonders, suddenly, what she’s going to eat, or whether she already has. Wonders what she does when she’s not on the clock, or when she’s not watching movies after hours in her small room in the servants’ quarters. He could follow her with the cameras the way Jake and Ms Marsden do sometimes, but they’ve complained she knows where to go to get away from them.
Val rolls her eyes at his thanks, dumps the rest of her cargo, and leaves without a word.
Ms Marsden’s still chatting away in the other corner of the room, subjecting Frankie to a stream of appalling nostalgia. The more Callum’s learned about Ms Marsden’s life, the less he likes her, and Frankie’s doing no better, judging by the hesitation with which she replies. The old woman doesn’t seem to have noticed, though, and just keeps going.
“We’re still scouting for a good pairing, Franks. Oh, we wanted to keep Declan and Trevor in-house, but for some reason Silver River doesn’t have an experienced facial feminisation surgeon on hand, so we had to pay through the nose. Hah! Through the nose! Anyway, it was money for the surgery—” she’s counting off on her fingers now, “—money for recovery, and money to keep them bloody quiet, and that was the biggest bill, I don’t mind telling you. We can’t afford to keep doing that, not even if that new couple come through; they’re old money, sure, but they’re new to it and the country pile isn’t as big as it was. No, if we’re spinning up again, we need our own people. Not bloody soldiers.”
“What people?” Callum asks.
“Haven’t you been listening? Doctors, Callum. Bloody doctors. Remember Laurel and Hardy, Franks?”
“Hah,” Frankie remarks, with that same hesitation, the one she’s been showing all morning. It’s always been there, there’s always been a distance between the two women, but Callum’s tended to put it down to Frankie’s oft-repeated insistence that until Ms Marsden came calling again, she was happy with her dogs. “Yeah. They were a pair.”
“Laurel and Hardy?” Callum says.
“Not their real names, of course,” Ms Marsden says. “But Karen especially had trouble remembering their actual names.” She frowns. “Or she couldn’t pronounce them. Don’t remember. Either way, the resemblance was uncanny, so they were Laurel and Hardy. And their work… It was outstanding.”
“And they’re not still available?”
“Oh, Lord, no. They were doddering even back then. And then cancer took one and that bastard Persimmon did for the other. Botched his granddaughter’s nose, or so he claimed. If you ask me, if he didn’t want to have children with faces out of a horror movie, he should have adopted. Remember the Persimmons, Franks? Incestuous lot. Probably a hundred new diseases lurking in that bloodline. And now the great-grandkids are starting to appear, the poor little fuckers. I tell you, it’s going to be spectacular watching those genetic bombs go off. Absolutely bloody spectacular.”
Callum decides to go back to ignoring her. He flips through the camera feeds instead, looking for Val, and finds her sitting with Trevor at the little table in the rec room in the servants’ quarters; rather, he finds Trevor and he finds Val’s forearms, the rest of her being out of shot. He nudges the trackball, shifts the camera mounted above the door, trying to get her in frame, and clearly she hears the motors in the camera mount, because when she swings into view, she’s got two fingers raised at the screen.
* * *
Christine’s making the breakfast today, and though she’s once again experimentally confirmed that she can’t hope to replicate Paige’s skill with cracking eggs one-handed, she’s damn good at the subsequent omelettes even if she has to break the shells with the back of a table knife. They’re in the main kitchen this time, partly because they don’t have the second years to herd or an outing to keep on schedule — the girls were effusive with their thanks, about which Paige has been adorably smug — and partly because Julia and Yasmin are both working from home today, and have set up a miniature office in the second-floor kitchen, the better to keep themselves supplied with coffee.
It’s early enough that there are few others around, and those who are — first-year sponsors, mostly, shuffling down the stairs in ones and twos to fetch coffee — have gathered in the dining hall, the better to leave Christine and Paige to themselves. It’s hard to find intimate moments when you live in a building that, even outside term-time, houses over sixty people, especially when most of them are naturally inclined — or, at least, deliberately re-engineered — to be well-meaning and extremely nosy. Maria, however, can do much with a glare and a raised eyebrow, and so they are left alone.
Christine’s left her phone on the table, quietly humming away at an ambient playlist, and the cold air streaming in through the high windows mingles with the low simmer of perpetual heat from the AGA in a manner that makes her nostalgic for winter holidays at home, before everything. A little piece of innocence.
She turns with a satisfied whirl, slides her omelette out onto her plate, and sits opposite Paige, who is just finishing hers. She knows Paige has been watching her the whole time; she’s got that sort of smile on. Christine returns it, and under the table hooks her ankle around Paige’s, finding a point of contact to maintain while she eats her breakfast.
These days could last forever.
So, naturally, someone shows up to ruin the mood. At least she’s done with her omelette when the tentative, almost embarrassed knock on the door out to the entrance hall jerks her attention away from Paige. And standing there, looking windswept and nervous, is Rachel Gray-Wallace.
Again?
Rachel says something, made inaudible by the glass, and Christine taps meaningfully at her wrist. It’s not even nine in the morning on a Saturday!
Can I come in? Rachel mouths, over-enunciating to make herself clear.
Christine glances at Paige, who shrugs. Fuck it. Why not? They can lock the door behind her, anyway. As she lets her in, she notices Paige covering her coffee mug with her palm. Probably wise; it’s the one with the anime girl and the caption Lo-T Beats to Feminise To.
Rachel’s moving with none of her former confidence, none of the anger that animated her the last time Christine saw her. Instead she steps carefully, hangs her bag on the hook by the door, extracts her phone and lays it face down on the table, and sits in the chair closest to the door. After a moment, she tucks in her legs and drags the chair forward, sitting at the kitchen table with her arms loosely crossed on the wood like a sullen child anticipating richly deserved punishment.
Christine doesn’t join her yet. Defaulting to hostess, she puts the kettle on again. To be annoying, she selects one of the funny mugs for Rachel. She never gets to put the boot in, and just this once…
No. Stupid. Supremely counter-productive. She puts the Morning Has Broken mug on the countertop, decorated side turned away, and takes out a plain one.
“Hello again, Rachel,” says Paige, placid.
“Hello,” Rachel says hesitantly.
“Are you going to behave yourself today?”
Christine snaps her fingers, pulling Rachel’s attention away from Paige — which seems like a good thing, since the question has her stumped — and towards the box of tea she’s holding up. After a confused second, Rachel nods, and Christine starts assigning teabags to mugs and adding water.
“I’m sorry,” Rachel says. “I feel like I’ve behaved appallingly—” Paige snorts in response to this, an uncharacteristically ugly sound from her, “—and I owe you an apology. Both of you. And a lot of other people, too. I’m… sort of debate-minded. And I forget other people aren’t. I forget it a lot.”
“Up on the first floor, the other day,” Paige says, “you thought that was a debate?”
“Oh. No. That was an outburst.” Rachel smiles, accepting the mug of tea from Christine, but it’s a smile that dissolves quickly, and she returns to Paige. “I’ve had time to think. A lot of time. Belinda made me sleep in the spare room, said I was keeping her up with all my thinking, and if I wasn’t going to tell her what was up, I should just— Oh. Sorry.” Paige’s deepening frown causes Rachel to pause, to pull herself together. “I’m here to apologise. Not to fight. Not to debate. I might have my problems with… what you do here, but—”
“I don’t do anything here,” Paige says pointedly. “Except write essays. I’m a student.”
“Oh. Sorry. I didn’t know.”
“You assumed.”
“Yes,” Rachel says, and exhales loudly through her nose. “Yes, I really did.”
“Who else are you here to apologise to?” Christine asks.
Rachel starts counting on her fingers. “Pippa,” she says, closing her thumb decisively, like Pippa’s the most important; she probably is, Christine decides. “Both of you. Jane. Maria. Beatrice, perhaps, if she’ll see me. Stephanie.”
“I don’t think you need to do the rounds,” Paige says. “I think a generalised apology is probably fine. Don’t bother Pippa.”
“I was horrible to her.”
“Yes. A tip: don’t walk into a house full of traumatised women and start accusing them of being rapists.”
“Oh, shit. Is she a survivor?”
“Not our place to say,” Christine says quickly, throwing a significant look at Paige. “And not your place to ask. And she’s… okay. She’s been spending a lot of time with Steph. Who, no, I suggest you also don’t ask to see.”
“Steph… He— She, sorry, I know everything about her, and that was— Shit. I’m bad at this. But she said Pippa’s her sister.”
“She is.” Christine leans forward over her tea. “We form close relationships here. Familial relationships. A lot of us don’t have anyone else, you understand? No-one but our family here.”
“I— Yeah. Yes. I get it. I mean, I don’t get it, I can’t imagine being— Yes. Sorry.”
“Slow down,” Paige suggests.
Rachel laughs weakly. “I’m trying. Look, I at least want to apologise to Maria, Beatrice and Jane. And then maybe you can… pass on my apologies to Steph and Pippa?”
“I’m impressed you remembered everyone’s names,” Paige says. “The list of people you offended is very long.”
“I have a good memory,” Rachel mutters, and then her expression turns awkward. “And, well, Shy and Liss called last night. Finished the yelling at me Amy started. Filled me in on Steph’s whole story, on a lot of other things. And they were able, once I promised I wasn’t going to do anything stupid — anything else stupid — to confirm names for me.” She looks down at the table. “I don’t exactly have a script I’m following, but…”
“You had your arse kicked,” Christine says.
“I did.”
“Well, why not drink your tea and then we can see about— Oh. Hi.”
Christine sees them before Rachel does, and braces herself for what might come next, but Rachel’s reaction to Amy and Jane padding sleepily into the kitchen from the dining hall in the exact same exhausted manner as all the other sponsors is surprisingly muted. Amy’s wearing one of Jane’s sleepshirts — Christine’s seen Jane wear it over jogging trousers sometimes, usually when she’s showing up late to a morning briefing — and they’re walking with their pinkies linked. It’s sweet.
“Morning, Amy,” Rachel says, sounding worn out.
“Rach?” Amy blurts out, leaving Jane in the doorway and running forward, and then stopping, indecisive, in the middle of the kitchen. “What are you doing here?”
“Embarrassing myself.”
“Wasn’t that yesterday?” Paige says. Christine frowns; Paige smirks back at her.
“And today, and tomorrow…”
“Okay,” Amy says. “What else are you doing here?”
“I came to—” Rachel starts, and blinks. “You stayed the night, didn’t you?”
Amy shrugs. “Duh.”
“With her?”
“Hello, Rachel,” Jane says, from the doorway. Briefly she meets Christine’s eyes; Christine can only shrug in response.
“Look, Jane,” Rachel says, “I’m really sorry. I was rude, I made assumptions and… I’m sorry.”
“Good,” Jane says, pushing up off the doorjamb and heading for the coffee machine. She swipes a mug off the side, fills it, and sits heavily down on the exact opposite side of the kitchen table from Rachel. Behind her, the doorway starts filling up with sponsors.
“We need to talk, Rach,” Amy says.
“That’s my line,” Rachel says. “But, yes, okay, sure.”
“Not here,” Edy says. She’s standing with Maria, an arm around her waist, a defiant show of affection. Everyone’s heard what Rachel said by now, or they’ve at least read the transcripts. “The second years’ll be down soon, probably, and the last thing they need is more of—” she waves a hand towards Rachel, “—that.”
“Jane,” Amy says, “is there somewhere we can go? Somewhere quiet?”
Jane slurps from her mug. Christine can’t help noticing it’s the Morning Has Broken mug she set aside earlier, and hopes Rachel doesn’t happen to focus on it.
“Anywhere in the first basement,” Jane says. “Can someone else take them? I’ve got to get my shit together and then go see Raph.”
No-one else volunteers, so Christine raises a hand.
“Who’s Raph?” Rachel asks.
“My special friend,” Jane says, unhelpfully.
“What—? Ah. Right.”
“Don’t make a scene, Rach,” Amy warns.
“Wouldn’t fucking dream of it,” Rachel murmurs, frowning again and standing from her seat. She looks like she might be winding herself up again, having been reminded that, yes, there are boys under the house, so Christine stands, too, to take them both downstairs with alacrity, and the action prompts a gasp and a guilty glance down from Rachel. “I let my tea get cold,” she says to Christine, who finds herself relieved that an abandoned mug of tea is apparently sufficient to derail Rachel’s train of thought, at least temporarily. “Sorry.”
“There’s a microwave downstairs,” Maria says. “And Jane, hide that bloody mug from her, would you? It’s too early for drama and I’m already at my limit.”
“Why would—?” Rachel says, as she collects her tea, her phone and her bag. “No. Never mind. I’m beginning to suspect I don’t want to know.”
As she leads Rachel and Amy out of the kitchen and towards the stairs down to the basement, Christine hears Paige ask which mug Jane picked, which means Jane will be showing Paige the lovely watercolour-effect artwork and the handwritten script which reads:
Michael has broken, calls herself Morgan
Bradley has spoken, a lovely new sound
Praise for the new girls, minus some organs
Praise for them springing out from underground
“I don’t get the reference,” Paige says.
Christine just about overhears Edy saying, “There’s no love for the classics any more,” and then they’re out of earshot and into the concrete stairwell. She knows it can be intimidating, so she checks behind her: Rachel is looking carefully at the floor, watching her step; Amy, though, meets her eyes and smirks, so Christine smiles back
Another hectic bloody morning.
* * *
“Are we really ready for this?”
“Honestly, Val, no. But I don’t see how we have a choice.”
Frankie leans against the sturdiest-looking shelf in the pantry and shoves her hands in her pockets. Val’s uncharacteristically nervous, which Frankie might have expected on a day like today if she hadn’t seemed positively bloodthirsty last night. But then, it might not be the prospect of dying in the escape attempt that scares her; it might be the prospect of surviving. It’s not escaped Frankie’s notice that Val, for all her arrogance and her bluster, hasn’t seen the outside world in thirty years, and a portion of her plans for the day have concerned what to do if Val just freezes.
She’s talked about it with Trev; they’ll pick her up if they have to.
“We can’t wait? Only another month until the next delivery.”
“No,” Frankie says, tensing her fists in her pockets. “The old woman’s getting ambitious again. That new family she saw recently? She’s talking about sending out more feelers. Getting more people involved. She hates being beholden to the Yanks; she wants British money, easy access. And more money means more Silver River bastards. No; this is our last shot before we become hopelessly outnumbered. Unless you want to try plan B.”
Plan B is setting fire to the manor and letting the chips and wooden beams fall where they may. It’s possible something structurally important will collapse before they all succumb to smoke inhalation.
“They’re not American,” Val says quietly.
“Hmm?”
“The Smyth-Farrow children.”
“Might as well be,” Frankie says. “And their cash is, anyway. They’ve got their hands across the aisle, remember?”
“I’ve been locked up for a long time, Frances,” Val says acidly, frowning at her. “You can’t just make these references and expect me to get them.”
Frankie nods apologetically. “Tax-free American church money. Fuck only knows what the church wants with Trev, or with any other of the poor lads they plan to manufacture.”
Val smiles. “That, I do know about. There is none so immoral as a priest most pious.”
In the kitchen, Trev rattles a plate in the sink: someone’s coming.
“Twenty minutes,” Frankie says quickly. “Give or take. They’ll probably be late; military precision is dead. Shit, Val, what did we come in here for again?”
Val steps to one side, revealing one of the last crates left in the pantry. “Very old potatoes,” she says. “Mostly eyes and shoots. I was planning to throw them out whatever happens today.” She doesn’t miss the look Frankie aims at her. “What? Always plan for failure, Frances.”
“That’s gloomy.”
“It’s been the only constant in my life.”
* * *
It’s Amy’s first trip downstairs, and if Rachel weren’t here she’d put on her most ingratiating and annoying voice and try to get Christine to take her on a tour of the basement — she really wants to meet one of the boys in their ‘before’ state, and she’s given to understand that time is running out on that already — but she has to content herself with a quick glance down the next flight of stairs, which frustratingly reveals nothing of interest. Just more concrete.
They really need to get a decorator down here.
It’s neat to see into the security room, though, and she waves at the girls on duty, only one of whom she knows by name, and then Christine’s directing them into an office space that reminds Amy of those little consulting rooms you spend a lot of time in when you’re shopping for a nose job. There’s even a pile of pamphlets which Christine sweeps out of the way and into a drawer before Rachel sees them.
“I’ll leave the door open,” Christine says, as the two of them get comfortable. “Bathroom’s down the hall and clearly labelled. Kitchen’s across from here and I’ll leave that door open, too. Everything else is locked, so don’t try it.”
Amy crosses her heart.
“What would we even try?” Rachel asks, eyeing walls of solid concrete.
Christine shrugs. “Often I can’t guess until someone tries it. Just don’t, okay? I’m trying to have a nice day.”
“Sorry.”
Christine glares at Rachel for a moment, and then smiles quickly for Amy and leaves the two of them alone, closing the heavy door to and, a second later, kicking a small wedge under it.
“If it bangs closed anyway,” she shouts through the door, “just wave your arms around and someone in the security room will see and come let you out. Don’t worry, you won’t suffocate.”
“Thanks, Christine,” Amy yells back, hands around her mouth. “Isn’t she nice?” she says, turning back to Rachel, who’s taken an office chair and tucked her legs under, and is slowly swinging herself from left to right, with one hand on the desk to guide her.
“I’m not reassured that she felt she had to mention suffocation,” Rachel says. Amy just points upwards at the vents. “Oh. Fine.”
Amy rests her chin on her wrist and regards her friend for a while. She’s displaced, unmoored. Which is understandable: she’s always been both moral and thorough and now here she is, one floor underground in a place which confounds her morals and would prefer she not poke around too much.
A thought occurs: “Does Belinda know?” She didn’t know before, Amy’s pretty sure, but Rachel left the Hall at speed yesterday, and had all day to seethe on it.
Rachel blinks at her. “What? No! What would I tell her? How would I tell her?”
“Well, you’re going to have to tell her something if you’re going to keep coming round here.”
“Why would I—?” Rachel pauses, stares at her. “Oh.”
“Not just me,” Amy says. “Shy spends half her waking hours here, too. She’s already talking about looking for work locally. Melissa’s going back to Manchester soon, but probably just to resign and empty out her flat, so it’s going to be the three of us in and out of here all the time.”
“I have other friends.”
Amy laughs. “So go. Leave the rest of us be.”
Rachel recoils as if Amy just slapped her. “You’re not serious, are you? Amy, you’re—!”
“Yes, I’m bloody serious!” Amy says, raising her voice. She’s putting on the performance she discussed with Jane, and she’s perhaps over-egging it a touch, but she’s also deadly serious about this. “Rach, you’re my oldest friend. I love you. But even if it doesn’t work out with Jane, I’m still going to keep coming here for Shy and Liss. So either you need to sort your shit out or you need to make room in your life for three new best friends.”
“That’s…” Rachel slumps in her chair. “Shit.”
“Thought you were just gonna come here, apologise and sod off, didn’t you?” Amy says with a smile.
“Yeah.”
“Come on.” Amy jumps up out of her chair. “Your tea’s cold. Forget microwaving it; let’s make a new cuppa and have that talk.”
* * *
It’s a larger delivery than the last one, and that means all hands on deck, even if some of those hands belong to people no-one under this roof officially trusts. But what can Trevor and Valérie even do? Callum’s run through all the escape scenarios he can think of, and in the best case, they both get caught or killed before they’re halfway down the driveway. He’s armed; Jake’s armed, and still in a royally shit mood with everyone; the two delivery men from Silver River’ll be armed, too. And Frankie’s got her taser. It’d take outside action to give the girls — or whatever they are — a chance. Outside action or, perhaps, a betrayal.
So he’s got his eye on Frankie.
They’re unloading into the main hall. Callum likes to imagine some older Smyth-Farrow, maybe one of the component parts of the stupid double-barrelled name, having a fit at the gouges the crates always leave in the tile, but when Silver River eventually inherits the manor from Ms Marsden it’ll see a lot worse. It’s an interesting question, actually: what would be more distasteful to the aristocratic ancestors of Stenordale Manor, the scuffed flooring or the corpses in the quad?
He knows his answer. Because, fuck, they made Valérie bury them. That shook him. Shook him hard.
Eyes on him. He turns to find Jake staring at him from his position by the door, and then he remembers: he’s in the wrong place. They’re supposed to be standing either side of the entrance, so when the men from Silver River are unloading, they’re covered from both sides. Not just in case Val or Trev try anything, which is a laughable prospect; in case one of the delivery men turns traitor, which is unlikely but something Jake insisted on planning for. After all, that was how young Trevor got here in the first place.
Everyone’s on edge.
Everyone except the delivery guys, apparently, because one of them’s whistling when he wheels in the first crate and the other greets them all with a smile. Callum suddenly envies them; they get to go home after this, or back to a Silver River facility, or down the pub, or somewhere else that isn’t this dusty fucking manor. He tries not to let it show in his face, and returns the man’s greeting in the spirit with which it was offered.
Trev and Val load the first crate onto the trolley and wheel it off down the corridor towards the kitchens, and Jake very obviously lets himself relax, which is permission for Callum to follow suit, and together they watch the others do their jobs.
It happens after the Silver River men dump the third crate in the entrance hall and are halfway back to the van. The first Callum knows something’s happening is when Jake leaps suddenly backwards, yelling his name, yelling for him to draw, and he whips around to see the twin silver darts of Frankie’s taser embedded in the wooden beam by the entrance.
She shot for Jake and she missed.
He takes an agonising moment, probably less than a second but perceptibly considerably longer, to clear his head, to suppress his instinctive response and to take stock, and it’s too long, because before he can properly assess the situation, Val’s collided with his stomach, rocking him, causing him to lose his footing temporarily, and then there’s an explosion of pain in the small of his back and his knees lock up. He tries to swear and nothing comes out and he realises Valérie must have Frankie’s backup, the crappy little stun gun Jake made fun of, and she’s got it rammed into him.
She’s not practised with it, though, or Frankie’s instructed her wrong, because she’s not keeping up the pressure, and it’s easy enough to turn away from her, put himself out of her reach, knock her away. He goes down on one knee because he’s shaking like fucking mad but he’s still upright, still capable, and that’s enough to take back the initiative from someone like Valérie.
She’s sensible, not coming back for him immediately but clearly weighing her options. She’s still got the stun gun, and now they’re facing each other there’s the chance she could get it in his face; if there’s enough charge left, she could seriously fuck him up if she gets lucky. So, hand on his gun, releasing the grip straps and carefully unholstering it — still fucking shaking — he takes another step away from her and, finally, gets hold of the situation.
The delivery guys aren’t back yet, but they probably heard him or Jake yelling, so it can’t be long. Jake himself is on the floor, with Trevor on top of him, flailing like a schoolgirl in her first playground catfight, and Frankie’s pointing another taser at them both — God only knows where she got it; she’s only supposed to have the one — tracking the melee, clearly afraid to fire in case she hits the wrong person.
Jake’s got his gun drawn but Trevor’s got his foot on Jake’s wrist, and that’s the only thing keeping the whole situation from resolution already. It’s easy to see how it plays out from here: Jake keeps Trevor at bay and Callum, now free of Val, can keep the women under gunpoint until the men from Silver River come back and end it all.
It’s fucking pathetic, it really is. They’ve thrown everything at this, all their meagre chances, even brought Frankie into it, and as soon as the delivery guys come back, it’s over. A twenty-second rebellion. And then nothing. Trevor and Val return to their assigned fates, likely after Ms Marsden lets Jake have a bit of fun, lets him have a spot of revenge. Death for Frankie, probably.
Trevor’s still got Jake’s gun hand under control, and Val’s deep-breathing, preparing to come at him again, and Frankie’s realising Callum’s free; only moments until she re-evaluates and tries to use her remaining taser on him.
He can take control of the situation so easily.
Callum feels calm as he points his pistol at Frankie. Calm and cold. Aware of himself.
“Stop,” he says, and Frankie’s taser hand lowers.
“Cal!” Jake yells, out of breath, apparently having more trouble with Trevor than either of them expected. “Get—this—fucking—tranny—off me!”
Calm.
Cold.
Aware of himself.
“Cal!”
When the men from Silver River come rushing in, guns ready, Callum shoots the first one in the thigh. The man instantly loses his footing, tumbles, and hits his head on the tile, and if that’s not it for him then he’s probably not getting up for a while. The other looks for the source of the bullet, his hearing deafened into uselessness by the proximity of the gunshot, and Callum aims for him.
“Disarm,” he orders. “Now!”
“Callum—!” Jake grunts. Out of the corner of his eye, Callum can see the struggle between Jake and Trevor has renewed.
“I said, disarm!” he repeats, and the Silver River man still standing leans down, places his gun on the floor, kicks it into the middle of the room. Val’s closest, and she starts for it. “Frankie,” Callum says, “go for the van. Start it. We’ll follow. I’ll drive. I can get you out of—”
Another deafening crack, another gunshot, and for an instant and forever, Callum’s colder still.
* * *
“So,” Rachel says, and Amy eyes her hard because she knows what she’s going to say, has been able to see it bubbling under ever since she walked into the kitchen. “You and Jane.”
“Me and Jane.”
“You and a— her.”
Amy spends a while looking into her tea before answering. Wondering what Jane would say. Wondering how she would say it. Wondering how she can keep her best friend. And when it comes out, it’s bitter and sharp and she has to wipe the spittle from her chin. “You’re going to say something gross about her, aren’t you?” she says. “Because I don’t care what you say and I don’t care what you think, but she’s—”
“Hey!” Rachel says, reaching out for her. Amy recoils. “Amy! I don’t know what you think I’m going to say, but it’s not what you think!”
“Oh, really?” Amy snaps back. “I know what you think when you look at these women, Rachel.”
“Fuck! Amy! Where is this coming from?”
“It’s—” she starts, and then pulls it back. “Isn’t it obvious?” she asks, forcing herself to be more calm. “You’re not the only one who’s been thinking, Rach. Ever since you walked back in here this morning, I’ve been wondering about your ulterior motive.”
“I don’t have one.”
“Bullshit.”
Rachel slaps the table, open-palmed. “I don’t! I really did just come here to apologise. And because you’re right: I don’t want to lose my friends. And you’re wrong, also. I don’t know what I think when I look at them.” She shakes her head. “I know what I see.”
“So go with that,” Amy says. “Go with what you see. Let them be bloody women, Rach. Because, yes: me and Jane.”
“I wasn’t going to call her a man or anything. I promise.”
“It’s what Liss thinks you think of her now.”
“What? That’s not— She didn’t say anything to me.”
Amy clasps her mug. The air con’s running a little hard; she’s chilly. “Why would she? We’re all just trying to keep you from doing anything that’ll hurt people.”
“Me?”
“Yes, you! Or did you forget why you came here today in the first place?”
Rachel glares at her, seems ready to snap at her, and then closes her eyes. Reaches for and drinks her tea.
“I hate this,” she says. “I hate feeling so tense around my best friend.”
“Yeah,” Amy says, “me too.” It’s an easy admission. Amy used to tell her everything, often to a level of detail Rachel found annoying. Losing that, even if only for a few days, has been an open wound.
“I’m not here to have a go at you,” Rachel says slowly. “And I’m not here with ulterior motives. I’m not going to do anything. I just want things how they were.”
Impossible not to smile at that. Amy yanks at the collar of Jane’s sleepshirt. “Not going to happen.”
“Right. You and Jane.”
“Me and Jane.”
“It’s… strange to see you with another woman,” Rachel says, with an emphasis on ‘another’ that Amy chooses to take as an olive branch. “You were always so boy-crazy.”
“I was,” Amy says carefully, watching Rachel. “But they always disappointed me.” A stray thought leaks out before she can stop it: “Maybe that’s why I understood this place so quick.”
Rachel doesn’t take offence, or if she does, she doesn’t show it. “They were that bad?”
“Oh, no. Not really. Well, Charlie bloody Carstairs was. But they just…” She leans forward again, blows on her tea. More for something to do than to cool it down. “You’ve never dated men. You don’t know what they’re like when they’re alone with you.”
“Tell me.”
They’ve talked about everything. Everything but this. Everything but the empty feeling that always chases her after being in a relationship for a few months. The deep and distracting dissatisfaction she’s found in every boyfriend. Because Amy always wondered if she was broken, if she was the missing piece in every relationship, and she didn’t want her best friend to be the one to confirm it.
“They just don’t give a shit, Rach,” she says. “And you expect more, because of course you do. So you go from man to man, looking for someone who cares.” She sips at her tea. “After a couple of months I’d always get to the point where I’d be up at night, obsessing over them. Over whether they were worth it. I used to wonder if something happened to me, if they’d stick around. If I got breast cancer, like Gran, so I had to have a mastectomy. Or a car accident. Or an illness. I’d wonder if I’d wake up and find them gone.”
“And?”
“Never found a man I could convincingly tell myself yes.”
“So,” Rachel says. “You and Jane.” Amy nods. “Do you like girls?”
“I never thought so. But growing up, it was just you and Shy and the girls at school. You were my friends and you know what the girls at school were like. And there was Mark, of course, and he was cute, and if it’d been him then I wouldn’t’ve had to wonder. But I never even really thought seriously about it, because he came as a package with Shahida, and he was also really obviously broken. And we all know how that turned out. She never even was a guy.”
Rachel nods slowly, running a hand over her chin. “I really need to apologise to Liss. I said such awful things.”
“Yes,” Amy says, “you really did.”
“Never said them to her, though.”
“No, but you said them. And you know what it’s like when someone’s a homophobe, don’t you? It doesn’t take much to tell.”
Rach smiles weakly. “Throw that back in my face, why don’t you.”
“I think your face kinda deserves it.”
“Yeah,” Rachel says. “True. She told me, actually, last night — Melissa, I mean — she told me to look at the women here the same way I do anyone who comes out. She said I wouldn’t tell a girl who just realised she likes girls—” and she directs another smile at Amy, “—that she’s still really straight, that she’s still straight inside. She said all that matters is the now.”
“It’s good advice.”
“I know. I’m just… I’m scared for you, Ames.”
“Because I like girls?” Amy says, sitting upright. “You like girls, Rach.”
“No. I mean… I mean, because of Jane.”
And they’re right back here again. “What now?”
“I’m not casting aspersions,” Rachel says quickly, waving a hand. “I’m not, I promise. I’m doing what Liss said. Or trying to. She’s a woman. But, Ames—”
“Don’t ‘Ames’ me if you’re going to be insulting.”
“What if she changes herself again?”
Okay. Yeah. This is the point where she walks away. Where she gets up and leaves Rachel to find her own way out of this concrete maze, because this is stupid—
“Amy!” Rachel says, louder and more insistent. “I’m serious! She wasn’t Jane ten years ago! If you go through with this, if you stay with her, how do you know she’ll still be Jane five, ten years from now?”
Half out of her chair, Amy lowers herself again. Because this really is stupid. “She’s not going to stop being Jane, Rach.”
“You can’t know that.”
“I— You know what? I can’t. But I can’t know that about anyone, can I? I can’t even know that about me! I could change my pronouns. I could change my name! I could do anything. Does that make me dangerous, Rachel?”
“No,” Rachel says, “I suppose not. But you’re not going to do any of that, are you?”
Amy hesitates. Shrugs. “Dunno,” she says. “But being around a bunch of trans girls— and don’t say a thing because what else am I going to call them? Being around a bunch of trans girls, it makes you think. Like, on the one hand, they’re so bloody happy to be women, Rach. They celebrate it! I can see it in all the little things, and you would, too, if you could pull your head out of your arse. Jane is… she’s so happy to be her. It’s the kind of thing that makes you appreciate what you have. But, at the same time, like I said, it makes you think. Makes you think, maybe you don’t have to be a girl all the time. Maybe you can try something else. Makes you think, maybe you’ve got options you never thought about.”
“This is… unreal, Amy.”
She seems unsure again. Rachel’s wobbled back and forth between confrontational and conciliatory, and this is perhaps the best chance to nail her down on the side Amy prefers. “I met some new people, Rach,” she says. “I expanded my horizons. I had a wicked handful of orgasms, too.” Into Rachel’s sudden blush, Amy continues, “Look, you don’t have to like the programme or the girls or even the bloody building. You don’t have to approve. Just… ease up, would you?”
“I’d love to. And if I stop thinking about it, I like the girls I’ve met here just fine, I do. But I can’t get it out of my head, Amy. They torture people here! I don’t understand how you’re so… unbothered.”
“I have doubts, too. I get it. The difference is, I talked about those doubts without blowing the fuck up.”
“And they talked you out of them,” Rachel says.
“Nope,” Amy says triumphantly. “Jane’s got doubts, too. Most people here do, she said. She got in a few of her friends and we talked about it and everyone’s kind of uneasy. Everyone’s a little unsure.”
“So why not stop? Why keep doing it, year after year?”
“Name another way of taking a dangerous man, a man who is genuinely becoming a threat to women, a man who needs help to change but who’ll never get it, because the system loves men like him.” A direct quote, but Amy can’t think of a better way to phrase it, especially not now, with her heart beating so fast she can feel it in her wrists.
“So you… kidnap him?”
“It’s more like, you throw him a life preserver. You see a guy in the masculinity doom spiral — Monica’s words — and you pull him out. If you can. And if you think he can hack it as a she. Not everyone can, and doing the whole programme to someone who can’t? That would be cruel.”
“So what about the others?” Rachel presses.
“They report them, if there’s evidence. But sometimes there’s just nothing they can do.”
“What? They just leave them there? We’re talking about men who’ve hurt women here, right?”
Amy leans forward. “So,” she says, smiling the kind of smile she puts on when she’s been made to play Monopoly with her family and she just got the first hotel, “you agree something has to be done? What do you suggest?”
“Fuck off,” Rachel says, but she does so lightly, with humour, the way she always used to, and Amy decides, yeah, this is it. This is the start of the breakthrough.
“Persuasive.”
“You know I don’t have the answers,” Rachel says. “No-one does.”
Amy’s smile broadens. “They do. Look,” she continues, when Rachel rolls her eyes at her, “we could go around in circles on this forever, and I really don’t want to and I think you’re sick of it, too.”
Rachel leans forward on her hands. “I didn’t come here to argue in the first place. I just want things to be normal again.”
“So let’s do something normal,” Amy suggests. “You try to stop yourself from thinking too much about stuff, and come back upstairs with me to say any apologies you feel you need to, and then… have lunch with me and my new friends. The lunch you should have had with us yesterday.”
“Sorry about that.”
“Forgiven,” Amy says lightly.
“About Jane,” Rachel says, and she sounds genuine, so Amy waits through her significant pause, allows her the time to gather her thoughts. “She’s nice, yes?”
“Yah,” Amy replies, aware that she sounds a little dreamy, the way she once did about Rachel’s older brother, “she is.”
“You think she could be, you know… it? I mean, I know it’s early, but like, do you think?”
“Yeah,” Amy says, trying not to sound triumphant, because if she’s interested, if she’s invested, then Amy’s got her, and it’s only a matter of time before Rachel forgets her objections, or decides they don’t really matter. “Yeah, she really could be.”
Rachel relaxes her shoulders, winds the tension out of her upper arms, and smiles for Amy. “I’m happy for you,” she says. “I am. And I’m not going to do anything, I promise. I’m worried, but I’m… working on it. Sorting it out in my head.”
“No more yelling?”
“No more yelling. Maybe some polite discussions. With a chaperone.”
“Oh?”
“I’d like to talk to Steph,” Rachel says. “I saw her just that one time, and she was… very annoyed with me. I want to try again. I want to listen. Because she’s trans and so I would have assumed she’d be against this place, but she called Pippa her sister and… I don’t know what to think. But I want to.”
“We can ask Maria. Or Pippa, but—” Amy catches Rachel’s wince. “Yeah. We’ll ask Maria.”
Rachel reaches for her, takes her hand, and this feels old again, like when they would sit up late in each other’s rooms. When they spent all the time they could together. When they were almost like sisters, too.
“Thanks, Ames.”
“You’re really happy for me?” Amy asks, squeezing at Rachel’s fingers but still needing the reassurance. “You’re not just saying that?”
“Haven’t I always told you, women are better?” Rachel laughs. “I just never expected you to take it to such an extreme.”
* * *
A momentous crash of thunder.
The zip of burned and tortured air.
A red stain under Callum’s eye, and he falls.
He falls quickly, fades faster still. Tendons loose; strings cut. Nothing left of him before he’s even halfway to the floor, and Valérie feels abstractly sorry for him. If he were another man, if he’d lived another life, then this moment would be a tragedy.
In this life, in her life, it’s an obstacle.
Instinctively she dropped when she saw Jake finally throw off his assailant and take aim, and now she’s flat on the tile, useless, unarmed and unable to move, pinned down by a rapacious bastard with a handgun aimed directly at her.
“You fucking bitches,” Jake’s muttering as he climbs to his feet, wiping blood from his cheek with one hand while keeping a steady aim on Valérie with the other. “You stupid fucking bitches. Put something in his head, didn’t you? He was a good lad. Soft. A bit thick. And now he’s dead.”
He shouldn’t be aiming at her. She’s unarmed. Helpless. Harmless. Is he just that sadistic?
And then she understands: there are guns all around her. Trevor’s against the far wall, bleeding from what looks like a shallow but unpleasant wound to the side of his neck, and Frankie’s still dithering, still keeping her second taser in hand, ready, and thus potentially a problem, but behind Val there’s Callum’s gun, centimetres from his fingers and most definitely loaded and ready to fire. And there’s the gun the unharmed delivery man kicked into the middle of the floor, and the still-holstered weapon belonging to the unconscious — dead? that was a hard fall, head-first — man that Callum shot.
What will she have to do to get hold of one?
“Ah-ah-ah!” Jake says, wobbling the tip of the gun minutely and without breaking his aim. “Stay still, Vincent.”
Shit. He knows exactly what she knows. He’s identified every weapon, seen every route she could take to get to one. And of course he has: of the two of them, one’s a trained, professional soldier, the other’s spent the last thirty years cooking roast beef dinners for revolting English pigs. An unarmed civilian under his gun, less than a metre away from a gun of her own? He’s probably killed a dozen of her.
So what will he expect her to do?
And then she’s out of time to think, because there’s a sudden crash of smashed crockery, and the vase Trevor’s thrown at Jake causes him to stumble, to raise his arms to protect his face, so while Trevor misses with the second vase and collapses back, grasping once again at the wound on his neck, Valérie gives in to her instincts and rises from the floor, both hands pushing off. She lifts herself as quickly as she can, feels something pop in her left thigh and something else in her right calf, but she’s on him, on Jake, faster than he can react, and either she’s faster or stronger than she thought, or Trevor managed actually to do some damage, because he overbalances and falls with her and she crashes to the ground for the second time in thirty seconds, this time with a monster of a man underneath her.
Her hand’s around his wrist more quickly than he can get it away from her, and he might be strong but she’s been a working woman for thirty years and she keeps hold of him, presses that hand to the ground. She doesn’t try knocking it against the tile the way Trevor did, knowing she has no chance of breaking his grip, and she thinks she has probably less than a second before Jake can begin to respond, so she twists, gets a foot onto his other wrist, crouches over him like a predatory insect, like a wounded and terrified creature desperate for blood, and with her free hand, hits him in the face as hard as she can.
Again.
Again.
Again.
He’s Crispin Smyth-Farrow, pressing himself upon her, forcing her to prepare her sisters for slaughter.
He’s Dorothy Marsden, leering at her from the other side of a cell door, extracting every possible pleasure from her imprisonment.
He’s the men, the endless fucking men, the ones who looked at her, the ones who touched her, the ones who were content simply to know her, her history, her unwanted physiology. One of Dorothy’s little toys, one of her attractions.
He’s Callum, lying dead, come to his conscience too late and spotted dark and ugly red on his face, too much in death like her parents, a memory raw.
He’s Jake.
She hits him again.
Less than ten seconds she has, ten seconds to make him suffer, ten seconds for her parents, for Vincent, for Valérie, for Béatrice, for all the girls she couldn’t save, even for Callum, and then he’s pushing against her again, moving himself the way she did, getting his legs into place, kicking at her. The first time he misses but the second time he drives his foot into her belly.
She holds on.
He kicks her again and that’s it. She overbalances, falls sideways, grasps again at his hand as she does so and finally, fucking finally, yanks the gun from his grip.
She can’t hold it. Slick with sweat and shaking from exertion she loses it, and it clatters and slides and scrapes against the tile, out of reach.
Out of his reach, too.
Their eyes meet. At least his face is a fucking wreck.
For a long second, they both take stock. Trevor’s moved, still bleeding but now halfway around the room from where he was; still nowhere especially useful, unless he’s going to try to throw another vase. Frankie’s connected to the second delivery man by the wires of her second taser, but she got him in the act of diving for his gun, and he’s probably not going to stay down for long; he’s already shakily climbing back up onto his elbows. And Jake and Valérie are both as far away from a weapon as each other.
It’s Callum who saves her. Jake dives for his gun but exhaustion and adrenaline cause him to fall early and he hits the floor, grunting in pain and landing far short of his target. Valérie, however, dives at the same time and lands on Callum, on the man’s cooling middle-aged spread, and she finds his gun before Jake finds his.
She can also stand more quickly, more ably than him. She and Trevor did a lot of work on him between them.
“Stop,” she commands. She’s pleased to find her voice calm, her hand steady. Finger inside the trigger guard, other hand steadying the stock, Valérie tries to remember everything she’s ever seen in movies about handguns. Aim for the centre mass; no trick shots, no head shots.
“Don’t be stupid, Vincent,” Jake says. He pushes himself up, faces her. “Our man’s up in a few seconds—” he nods at the delivery man, now struggling against Frankie, who looks destined to lose, and lose quickly, “—and that’s your only weapon. Shoot me, and he’ll drop you right after.”
“Jacob,” Valérie says, “I’ve been waiting to die for thirty years.”
She fires.
The recoil feels like it’s going to take her arm from her. Her shoulder bucks, feels like it dislocates, and the white-hot flash and the noise, the deafening fucking noise, are overwhelming. She’s forced backwards, ankles catching on Callum’s body, and this time she falls hard, topples over on him, and that’s what Jake needs.
Because she fucking missed.
Oh, okay, she thinks, as he charges at her, perhaps she got him in the side, a little. Grazed him. Gave him a nasty burn he’ll still be thinking about in a month’s time, when she’s long since been buried with her sisters. She’s stupid, like he said. Of the three of them who remain, she was the last one who should have got the gun. It should have been Trevor, who’s trained in the damn things. It could even have been Frankie. But it was her, the once-promising boy, the lifelong maid, the prisoner, the failure.
The fool. For believing, even for a moment, that this could work.
And then there’s another crash of sound, loud enough again that she thinks she might not hear properly for the rest of her life, and Jake, inches from her, is thrown sideways. She backs up, stands up, looks around, finds Trevor, still clasping at his neck with one hand — he’s absorbing the blood with a stack of doilies, of all things — but with the other he holds what must be Jake’s gun, and his first shot knocked Jake down.
Got him in the leg, it looks like. It’s probably smart, looking at the angles: immobilisation was probably easier, for Trevor, than a kill.
Trevor steps smartly forward and shoots the delivery man, moments before he can get to his gun. Two in the head. Swings back around to aim at Jake, but Jake’s ready for him.
But not the way Valérie expects. Because Jake runs. He throws himself at Trevor’s feet, knocks him down but doesn’t disarm him, and while Trevor’s righting himself, Jake scrambles back up and runs for the end of the corridor, colliding with a table and making it around the corner just as Trevor, wobbling under the weight of the gun and his injury, plants a bullet in the wall.
“Come on,” Trevor says, and there’s blood in his voice, “we have to go. He can disable the gate mechanism if he gets to the security room. Valérie! Frankie! We have to go!”
Valérie’s the first of the two of them to come to her senses, to stop watching the end of the corridor, waiting for Jake to come back out, freshly armed, and finish them. She’s moving before she has a chance to register where she’s going, and she drags on Frankie’s arm as she passes. Frankie’s grabbed the gun off the floor, the one belonging to the second delivery man to die, but she drops it as Valérie pulls on her, and Valérie decides, fuck it, leave it; none of them except Trevor can shoot, anyway.
Within seconds they’re moving quickly, or as quickly as they can. Frankie’s the only one not to have been hurt, and while Valérie, in theory, is used to pain, it’s been a long time since she’s been so knocked around, so Frankie’s first to the van. She stands there by the open back doors, beckoning, and Valérie looks behind to see Trevor struggling.
Together they fetch him, all the while with an eye to the gates, waiting for a red light or a loud click or some kind of sign that Jake’s beaten them to it, that he’s turned them off, that the van, when eventually they’re loaded up, won’t be able to open them, will trap them as efficiently as the manor always has.
She gets in the back with Trevor, sits him down on a crate, checks on him quickly — he still has enough strength to keep holding his wad of doilies to his throat — and climbs through the gap in the front seats. She drops painfully into the passenger seat and starts looking for the gate control switch.
She finds it and stabs at it, and the second or two before the gates start to respond and slide apart, their near-three-metre height slowly grinding along the cobblestones, is the longest Valérie’s ever had to wait for anything.
Frankie climbs into the driver’s seat. The engine’s still running, to keep the heater going on such a cold day, although Valérie doesn’t see any keys anywhere, and the whole dashboard in fact looks like one of those modern phones Frankie has, but it doesn’t seem to matter, because Frankie jams her foot to the floor and the van grinds on the stones for a moment and leaps forward.
“Val!” Frankie says, tapping on her shoulder. “Check on Trev, will you?”
The gate passes them, the walls pass them, and they’re away, onto a barely paved, narrow and winding road closed in on both sides by dormant winter trees.
“Val!”
It doesn’t take long, though, with Frankie pushing the van up to forty, fifty, sixty, for the tree cover to start to fade, for them to crest the rise, and in front of them is suddenly a sun-bright and brittle landscape, their road widening, their destination ahead of them at the base of the hill, a village, a town, a fucking city, Valérie doesn’t know which, can’t know, would have no way to know anything except that it’s something new, something real, something free.
“Val! I don’t know how much blood he’s lost! Check on Trevor, Val!”
The world goes on forever.
* * *
She’s Dina and he’s Declan and he doesn’t know any more from day to day, from hour to hour, which name he should claim, which life he should lead. He’s taken and she’s used and he’s beaten and she’s caressed and he’s mutilated and she’s dressed in pretty things. He would once have believed himself unchangeable, and for a while the girls at Dorley Hall, the girl Monica, proved him right, handed him a victory, but now he’s here and she’s here too and they are, both of them, shattered and gathered and rebuilt into someone he doesn’t want to recognise.
Monica. Val. The older woman, Frankie. All of them. She shouldn’t have pushed. Shouldn’t have fought. Shouldn’t shouldn’t shouldn’t but did anyway. Because he was proud. And pride brought him here. Left him with Jacob. The first one of them to rename her. The first one of them to remake her. The first one of them to—
The door. That’s not right! It stays locked. Stays locked and shut unless it’s one of those nights, and she was told no, not tonight, because Jake’s on guard duty, real guard duty, and he’ll be tired, the sort of tired she can’t help with. He’s getting old, see, Dina, love, and he puts up a good front, but some nights, all he’s good for is sleep. Maybe a little telly.
The door.
Jake.
Please! Not tonight!
But here he is, anyway, chasing away for now the last hints of Declan, the man who couldn’t survive him, but something’s wrong, everything’s wrong. He’s been beaten, he’s been bruised. Swollen jaw, cheek, eye. Cuts and contusions all over. Limping badly. And, Jesus, with his shirt half-open she can see the bandage wrapped triple around his belly. Blood seeping through.
Bottle of beer in one hand. Almost empty.
“Oh, Dina,” he says, sitting down next to her, where she’s sat, knees together like he taught her, on the little bed they allow her. “Oh, Dina.”
She says nothing. What would she say?
“It’s been a fucking day, Dina. A fucking day. Callum betrayed us. Sided with Vincent. Frankie did, too, but I’m not so surprised by that. Callum, though, he was a good lad. I knew his uncle, you know. Wasn’t in Silver River. Knew him from the army. Heard he died. Don’t know how. Better man than Callum, in the end. Had to put him down myself. One shot. Was a good shot.”
He finishes his bottle, throws it. It clatters into the corner by the vanity.
“So now it’s just us, Dina. Just you and me and the old woman. We’re going to have to build back from scratch, aren’t we? But we will. We’ve got the money. We’ve got the people. And we’re going to find Vincent and we’re going to fucking kill him. Slowly. For Callum, right? For the man he should have been.”
Val and Frankie are gone? And the other one, the quiet one, the one who’s always watching her; gone, too? Gone and left her behind, alone with Jake?
Beer on his breath. Blood on his face. Sinking into her arms, he feels slow and weak, brought down by injury and pain and alcohol.
“I need you, baby. I need you. Just let me hold you, just let me rest. We’re going to get them, baby. We’re going to do it, starting tomorrow. But for now, I just need to rest.”
He’s disgusting. He’s old and he’s losing his shape to this job and he’s starting to look the way Declan’s dad used to, starting to sound like him, too, that guttural growl, that alcoholic murmur. She’s always been revolted by him, always wanted to push him away. But they took her strength from her, enough that she’s been unable before to push him off even when he’s unconscious.
But the others are gone. Gone without her. Gone with what little hope she had left. Leaving her and Jake and Grandmother. So what can she do? What should she do? What is left to do?
“Kiss me, baby,” he says. “Kiss me.”
“No,” she says.
Dina goes for the fucking eyes.