“I need to talk to her,” Lizzie said. Her voice was raw, low, but it carried over the distant shouts and screams.
“She said not to let anyone through except Dennis,” Jilly Fish said. She didn’t say a word about Liz’s nakedness, or the ridged, glossy lines of old scars that covered her from neckline to crotch.
Earnshaw twisted her neck to the left, then to the right, and flexed her fingers. “I need to talk to her,” she repeated.
“What’s it about?” Fish asked.
“It’s private.”
For a moment or two nobody spoke. Fish interrogated Earnshaw’s stern, serious face and came to a quick conclusion.
“Time for our fag break,” she said to her companion. “Come on.”
“But Grace said…” The other woman, a tall blonde with a bodybuilder’s overdeveloped physique, faltered into silence. Fish was already walking away, and now Lizzie was coming straight on. The blonde was the same height as Lizzie but out-massed her by twenty or thirty pounds. The muscles of her arms were like sculpted stonework.
She held her ground almost to the last moment, then threw up her hands and backed away. “Private,” she said. “Fair enough.” She turned and ran.
Grace was washing at the sink when Earnshaw walked into the room. Jess slipped in behind her, flattening herself against the wall.
Grace raised her eyebrows at the sight of them but then she welcomed them in with an ironic sweep of her arm. She walked around them to kick the door to, shutting out the worst of the noise from outside.
“I don’t know what it is with this one,” she said to Earnshaw with a nod of her head in Jess’s direction. “I keep telling people to kill her and she keeps coming back into my field of vision not dead. Do me a favour, Lizzie, please. Put us all out of her misery.”
Earnshaw didn’t seem to have heard. “I had… a really awful dream, Grace,” she said in the same rasping voice as before. She bowed her head into her own clenched fist. Pressed it hard against her forehead, grimacing with effort, as though she was trying to push through and grab hold of something in there. “I want to talk to you about… something that happened.”
“Later, love,” Grace said. “This is a busy time. Let’s get the chores done first.” But still Lizzie didn’t move.
Grace turned to glance at Jess, her lips pressed into a thin line. “Well, I’ll give you ten for balls and one for brains,” she said in the same conversational tone. “What did you think? That you were on a roll after winning your appeal? That you could talk me into not killing you? You can’t.”
Jess didn’t bother to answer. Grace seemed like an irrelevance right then. She was much more scared for Alex, trapped in Liz’s dark heart, than she was for herself. She spoke only to Earnshaw, who was struggling in the grip of some emotion that was close to panic. “Earnshaw,” she said. “Tell me who she was. The girl you killed. What was her name?”
Earnshaw didn’t seem to have heard. Her shoulders twitched and twisted. “Please, Grace,” she moaned. Her voice seemed to be on the brink of dying away altogether now, a broken instrument driven by inadequate breath. “I dreamed she came back. But now I’m awake and she’s still here. She didn’t go away when I woke up.”
Grace looked perplexed. “Later,” she said again. “Come on, Lizzie. You’re no use to yourself like this. Clock that bitch and be done with it.”
Earnshaw turned and took a step towards Jess, her big hands reaching out. But then she stopped as though she’d forgotten what it was she was meant to do.
“What was her name?” Jess shouted. “Who was she?”
“Why?” Earnshaw demanded in that same voice of agony and exhaustion.
“Because she deserves to be remembered! Nobody remembers her right now. She doesn’t even remember herself. But you know who she was.”
“It’s not my choice,” Earnshaw rumbled. Jess realised then that Earnshaw wasn’t talking to her, or to Grace for that matter. She was talking to a voice inside her own head.
To Alex.
Jess laughed – a strangled sound of surprise and relief. He was still there, in Earnshaw’s fractured soul. Still fighting.
Grace walked right up to Earnshaw, took her by the shoulders and shook her. “Come on, Lizzie! What do I pay you for? Sort her out!”
For a moment, Earnshaw only stared. Then she gathered herself, her whole body, by some huge effort of will. A shudder ran through her. She crossed to Jess in three strides.
“Tell me who—” Jess said again, and had to stop. Earnshaw’s hand shot out and clamped on her throat. Her other hand reached round to grip the back of Jess’s neck. The flesh there, like the flesh on the right side of her face, was burned and imperfectly reconstructed, but even through that barricade she could feel the calloused toughness of Earnshaw’s grip.
She grabbed the wrist of the hand that was around her throat and tried to pull it away. She couldn’t budge it. It started to tighten. Earnshaw stared at her at point-blank range, rigid as a statue, implacable as a hanging judge.
“That’s better,” Grace said. “That’s my girl.”
Earnshaw drew Jess close. One hand squeezed and the other twisted. Jess struggled as her airway closed. She might as well have been trying to dismantle a wall with her hands.
I remember! a voice said. It seemed to come to her across a great distance, almost drowned out by the sound, suddenly very loud, of her own heartbeat. It was Alex’s voice. Jess, I remember now! Can you see it?
Jess thought she could. Dimly, and getting dimmer by the second. But she couldn’t speak to say so.
93
What she saw was:
A prison cell, right here in Goodall block to judge by the floor plan and the colour scheme. Mostly anonymous, grimly generic, although there was a picture on the wall – a sketch of Liz Earnshaw drawn in blue biro. In the picture Liz was smiling, which had to make you wonder if the artist had ever met her or was just drawing her from a verbal description. The shaded areas were done by drawing in lots of short lines, horizontal and vertical. Cross-hatching, like an image in a comic book.
Nothing else about the cell stood out. There was a table. There were two chairs. There was a toilet without a seat, the cistern clamped to the wall with a thick steel bracket. There was a locker unit with two lockers, an upper and a lower. That was riveted to the wall too. On the windowsill, two ceramic giraffes intertwined their necks in an impossible caress.
And on the bunk – a real embrace. Liz Earnshaw, gaunt and gangling, was folded around another woman, both of them naked. This second woman was so short that for a second, cradled in Earnshaw’s arms, she looked like a child. Or perhaps the ghost of a child still lingered, for a second, behind her eyes.
But she wasn’t Alex Beech. She’d only worn his face for a while – from the time when Jess first saw her down in the abyss to the moment, less than an hour ago, when the two of them had stepped into Earnshaw’s dreams. She wore her own face now. Dark skin, slightly angular cheeks, brown eyes with thick black eyeliner, and a flat nose like a blade. No breasts to speak of, and no hips either. She smiled as she pushed back into Earnshaw’s embrace, settling herself there with a smug, proprietorial air.
“Settle down,” Earnshaw growled. “You’re keeping me awake.”
“Well, as long as you’re awake,” the other woman said, “you can scratch my back.”
Earnshaw did as she was bidden with a sigh and a long-suffering “Bloody hell!”
“Lower,” the woman said.
“Any lower and I’ll be in your arse crack.”
“Yes please.”
The scene broke up in front of Jess’s eyes as her profligate brain burned through the last few molecules of oxygen that were sustaining it. Arcs and streaks of abstract colour replaced the vision of the prison cell. The colours swirled in the air irresolutely, as if they wanted to come together again but something was preventing them.