I want so desperately to see you again.
I waited for Lena until, defeated by exhaustion, I finally went to bed. I’d had so much trouble sleeping since I returned to this place and it was catching up with me. I collapsed, drifting in and out of dreams until I heard the door go downstairs, Lena’s footsteps on the stairs. I heard her going into her room and turning her music on, loud enough for me to hear a woman singing.
That blue-eyed girl
said ‘No more’,
and that blue-eyed girl
became blue-eyed whore.
I slowly drifted back to sleep. When I woke again the music was still playing, the same song, louder now. I wanted it to stop, was desperate for it to stop, but I found I couldn’t raise myself from the bed. I wondered whether I was awake at all, because if I was awake, what was this weight on my chest, crushing me? I couldn’t breathe, couldn’t move, but I heard the woman singing still.
Little fish, big fish, swimming in the water –
come back here man, gimme my daughter.
Suddenly, the weight lifted and I rose from the bed, furious. I stumbled into the hall and shouted for Lena to turn the music down. I lunged for her door handle and yanked the door open. The room was empty. Lights on, windows open, cigarette butts in the ashtray, a glass next to the empty bed. The music seemed to be getting louder and louder, my head pounded and my jaw ached, and I kept shouting even though there was no one there. I found the iPod dock and ripped it out of the wall, and at last, at last, all I could hear was the sound of my own breath and my own blood pulsing in my ears.
I returned to my room and phoned Lena again; when there was no answer, I tried Sean Townsend but the call went straight to voicemail. Downstairs, the front door was locked and all the lights were on. I went from room to room, turning them off one by one, stumbling as though drunk, as though drugged. I lay down on the window seat where I used to sit and read books with my mother, where twenty-two years ago your boyfriend raped me, and again I fell asleep.
I dreamed that the water was rising. I was upstairs in my parents’ bedroom. I was lying on the bed with Robbie at my side. Outside, rain thundered down, the river kept on rising, and somehow I knew that downstairs the house was flooding. Slowly at first, just a trickle of water seeping under the door, and then more quickly, the doors and windows bursting open, filthy water pouring into the house, lapping against the stairs. Somehow I could see the living room, submerged in murky green, the river reclaiming the house, the water reaching the neck of the Drowning Dog, only now he was no longer a painted animal, he was real. His eyes were white and wide with panic, and he was struggling for his life. I tried to get up, to go downstairs to save him, but Robbie wouldn’t let me, he was pulling my hair.
I awoke with a start, panicked out of my nightmare. I checked my phone, it was after three in the morning. I could hear something, someone moving around the house. Lena was home. Thank God. I heard her coming down the stairs, her flip-flops slapping against stone. She stopped, framed in the doorway, the light behind her illuminating her silhouette.
She started to move towards me. She was saying something, but I couldn’t hear her, and I saw that she wasn’t wearing flip-flops at all, she was wearing the heels she wore to the funeral, and the same black dress, which was dripping wet. Her hair clung to her face, and her skin was grey, her lips blue. She was dead.
I woke up, gasping. My heart was hammering in my chest, the banquette beneath me was soaked with sweat. I sat up, confused, I looked at the paintings opposite me and they seemed to shift, and I thought, I’m still asleep, I can’t wake, I can’t wake. I pinched my skin as hard as I could, dug my nails into the flesh of my forearm and saw real marks, felt real pain. The house was dark and silent save for the river’s quiet susurration. I called Lena’s name.
I ran upstairs and along the corridor; Lena’s door was ajar and the light was on. The room was exactly as I’d left it hours before, the water glass and the unmade bed and the ashtray untouched. Lena wasn’t home. She hadn’t been home. She was gone.
PART THREE
MONDAY, 24 AUGUST
Mark
IT WAS LATE when he got home, just after two o’clock in the morning. His flight from Málaga had been delayed, and then he’d lost his ticket for the car park and it had taken him an infuriating forty-five minutes to find his car.
Now he wished it had taken longer, he wished he had never found the car at all, had had to stay in a hotel. He could have been spared, then, for just one more night. Because when he realized, in the darkness, that all the windows of his house had been smashed, he knew that he wouldn’t be sleeping, that night or any night. Rest was over, peace of mind destroyed. He had been betrayed.
He wished, too, that he had been colder, harder, that he had strung his fiancée along. Then, when they came for him, he would be able to say, ‘Me? I’m just back from Spain. Four days in Andalucía with my fiancée. My attractive, professional, twenty-nine-year-old girlfriend.’
It wouldn’t have made a difference though, would it? It wouldn’t matter what he said, what he did, how he’d lived his life: they would crucify him anyway. It wouldn’t matter to the newspapers, to the police, the school, the community, that he wasn’t some deviant with a history of chasing after girls half his age. It wouldn’t matter that he had fallen in love, and been fallen in love with. The mutuality of their feelings would be ignored – Katie’s maturity, her seriousness, her intelligence, her choice – none of these things would matter. All they would see was his age, twenty-nine, and hers, fifteen, and they would rip his life apart.
He stood on the lawn, staring at the boarded-up windows, and he sobbed. If there had been anything left to smash, he would have broken it himself then. He stood on the lawn and he cursed her, cursed the day he’d first set eyes on her, so much more beautiful than her silly, self-assured friends. He cursed the day she’d walked slowly towards his desk, full hips swinging gently and a smile on her lips, and asked, ‘Mr Henderson? Can I ask for your help with something?’ The way she’d leaned towards him, close enough that he could smell her clean, unperfumed skin. He’d been startled at first, and angry, he’d thought she was toying with him. Teasing him. Hadn’t she been the one who started all this? And why should it be him, then, left alone to suffer the consequences? He stood on the lawn, tears in his eyes, panic rising in his throat, and he hated Katie, and he hated himself, and he hated the stupid mess he’d got himself into, from which he now saw no escape.