The Shining Girls A Novel

Kirby

23 MARCH 1989

There are clouds scudding low over the lake like puffy boats in the gray light of morning. Barely 7 a.m. There’s no way Kirby would be up at this time normally, if not for the Damn Dog.

Before she’s even managed to turn off the car, Tokyo is climbing over from the back seat of her fourth-hand Datsun, crushing her arm with his big galumphing paws as she reaches to pull up the handbrake.

‘Ooof, you galoot,’ Kirby says, shoving him off her and onto the seat, a service he rewards by farting in her face. He has the decency to look guilty for all of one second before he starts pawing at the door and whining to be let out, his tail thumping against the sheepskin cover that hides how badly cracked the seat is.

Kirby reaches past him and manages to flick the catch. Tokyo barges the door open with his head and slips through the gap into the parking lot. He bounds round to her side of the car and jumps up with both paws against the window, tongue-lolling, his breath fogging up the window, as she’s trying to get out.

‘Hopeless, you know that?’ Kirby grunts, shoving the door open against his weight. He gives a bark of delight and runs to the grassy verge and back again, urging her to hurry up, in case the beach ups and leaves. The way she’s about to bail on him.

She’s feeling pretty cut up about it. But she’s been been saving so she can move out of Rachel’s house, and the junior dorms are gestapo-strict on the no furry roommates clause. She tells herself that she’ll be only a few hops away on the El. She’ll be able to take him for walks on the weekends and she’s persuaded the kid across the road to take him round the block once a day for a dollar. Still, that’s five bucks a week, twenty a month. That’s a lot of Ramen.

Kirby follows Tokyo down the path to the beach through the rustling corridor of overgrown grass. She should have parked closer to the actual beach, but she’s used to coming here at weekend lunchtimes, when you can’t find an empty bay for money or love. It’s a totally different place without the crowds. Ominous even, with mist and a cold wind off the lake scything through the grass. The chill will have put off all but the most dedicated joggers.

She takes the grimy tennis ball out of her pocket. It’s cracked and balding and squidgy from being chewed on. She sends it arcing in a high parabola over the skyline across the lake, aiming for the Sears Tower, as if she could knock it over.

Tokyo has been waiting for this, ears pricked, mouth snapped shut in concentration. He turns and pelts after the ball, anticipating its trajectory with mathematical precision and snatching it out of the air on its way down.

And this is the thing that drives her nuts, when he gets all coy with the ball. Skipping forward like he’s going to drop it into her hand and then ducking to one side as she reaches for it, with a delighted rumble in the back of his throat.

‘Dog! I’m warning you.’

Tokyo hunches down, butt in the air, tail thwacking from side to side. ‘Owwwwrrrr,’ he says.

‘Give me that ball or I’ll … have you turned into a rug.’ She feints at him and he bounds away two steps, just out of range, and assumes the position again. His tail is helicoptering wildly.

‘It’s all the rage, you know,’ she says, ambling down the beach, thumbs in the pockets of her jeans, playing it cool, definitely not aiming for him. ‘Polar bears and tigers are so passé. But a dog-skin rug – especially a troublesome dog? That’s class, baby.’

She lunges for him, but he’s been wise to her all along. He yips in excitement, the sounds muffled by the ball clamped between his teeth, and bolts down the beach. Kirby lands on one knee on the damp sand as he bounds into the freezing surf, with a doggy grin so big she can see it from here.

‘No! Bad dog! Tokyo Speedracer Mazrachi! You get back here, now!’ He doesn’t listen. He never does. Wet dog in the car. One of her favorite things.

‘Come on, boy.’ She whistles for him, five sharp notes. He obeys, sort-of. He wades out of the water at least and drops the ball onto the bleached sand, shaking himself out like a doggy sprinkler. He barks once, happily, still playing.

‘Oh for God’s sake,’ Kirby says, her purple sneakers sinking into the mud. ‘When I catch you—’

Tokyo suddenly whips his head in the other direction, barks once and races across the grass near the pier.

A man in a yellow fisherman’s weatherproof is standing at the water’s edge, beside a cart contraption with a bucket and a fire extinguisher. Some kind of weird fishing technique, she realizes, as he pops his sinker into a metal pipe and then uses the pressure of the extinguisher to send it flying out into the lake further than he could have ever cast it.

‘Hey! No dogs!’ he shouts agreeably, pointing at the faded sign in the overgrown grass. As if whatever he’s doing with that fire extinguisher is legal.

‘No! Really? Well, you’ll be glad to know it’s not a dog anyway, it’s a rug-in-waiting!’ Her mother calls it her sarcasm force field, keeping boys at bay since 1984 – if only she knew. Kirby scoops up the scuffed tennis ball and shoves it in her pocket. Infernal animal.

She will be glad to move into the dorms, she thinks, fiercely. The neighbor is welcome to the dog. She’ll do weekends if she has time: inclination. But who knows? She might be stuck in the library. She might be hungover. Or have a hot boy to entertain to sweet/awkward morning-after breakfast now that Fred has gone off to NYU and film school, as if that wasn’t her dream that he kind of acquired and ran with, and worst of all, was able to pay for. Even if she’d been accepted (and she should have been, dammit – she has more talent in her left earlobe than he has in his whole central nervous system), there’s no way she could have paid for it. So she’s doing English and history at DePaul, two years and a lifetime of debt to go, assuming she can get a job after graduating. Of course, Rachel has been nothing but encouraging. Kirby almost considered doing accounting or business sciences to spite her.

‘Tokyoooooooo!’ Kirby yells into the brush. She whistles again. ‘Stop messing around.’ The wind nips through her clothes, bringing goose-bumps up on her arms all the way to the back of her neck – she should have worn a proper jacket. Of course he’s gone into the bird sanctuary, where he can snag her a really stiff fine for letting him off the leash. Fifty dollars or two weeks’ worth of walking fees. Twenty-five packets of Ramen. ‘Decor, dog!’ Kirby yells down the empty beach. ‘That’s what you’re gonna be when I’m done with you.’

She sits on a bench carved with names – ‘Jenna + Christo 4eva’ – by the entrance to the sanctuary and pulls her shoes back on. The sand chafes in her socks, wedged between her toes. There is a Peewee calling in the bushes somewhere. Rachel was always into birds. She knew all their names. It took Kirby years to figure out that she was making them up, that there was no such thing as a Riding Hood Woodpecker or a Crystal Rainbow Malachite. They were just words Rachel liked to put together.

She stomps into the sanctuary. The birds have stopped singing. Silenced, no doubt, by the presence of a wet and troublesome dog blundering around here somewhere. Even the wind has died, and the waves are a dull shushing in the background, like traffic. ‘Come on, damn dog.’ She whistles again, five notes, ascending.

Someone whistles back, exactly the same.

‘Oh, that’s really cute,’ Kirby says.

The whistle comes again, mocking.

‘Hello? Jerkwad?’ She ups the sarcasm in proportion to how badly unnerved she is. ‘Have you seen a dog?’ She hesitates for a second before she steps off the path, pushing through the dense underbrush towards the general vicinity of the whistler. ‘You know, furry animal, teeth to rip your throat out?’

There’s no reply, save for a rasping, hacking noise. A cat with a hairball.

She has time to yelp in surprise as a man steps out from the shrubs, grabs her arm and swings her to the ground with quick and incontestable force. She wrenches her wrist as she automatically sticks it out to catch herself. Her knee hammers into a rock so hard that her vision goes briefly white. When it clears, it’s to see Tokyo lying heaving on his side in the bushes.

Someone has wrapped a wire coathanger round his neck so that it cuts into his throat, leaving the fur around it soaked with blood. He’s twisting his head, squirming his shoulders, trying to get away, because the wire is looped to a branch sticking out of a fallen tree. Every time he moves, it cuts in deeper. The hacking sound is him trying to bark with his vocal cords severed. At something behind her.

She forces herself up on to her elbows, in time for the man to swing the crutch into her face. The impact shatters her cheekbone in an explosion of pain that arcs through her skull. She crumples onto the damp earth. And then he’s on top of her, his knee in her back. She writhes and kicks under him, as he wrests her arms behind her, grunting while he wires her wrists together. ‘F*ckyougetoffme’ she spits into the mulch of dirt and leaves. It tastes of damply rotting things, soft and gritty between her teeth.

He rolls her over roughly, panting through his teeth and rams the tennis ball into her mouth before she can scream, splitting her lip and chipping a tooth. It compresses as it goes in, expands to force her jaw open. She chokes on the taste of rubber and dog spit and blood. She tries to push it out with her tongue only to encounter a shard of enamel from a broken tooth. She gags at this piece of her skull in her mouth. The vision in her left eye has gone hazy and purple. Her cheek bone, pushing up against the socket. But everything is contracting anyway.

It’s hard to breathe around the ball. He’s wound the wire so tight around her hands, pinned beneath her, that they’ve gone numb. The edges are digging into her spine. She churns her shoulders, trying to get traction to wriggle away from him, sobbing. No destination in mind. Away, please God, just away. But he’s sitting on her thighs, clamping her down with his weight.

‘I’ve got a present for you. Two,’ he says. The tip of his tongue is sticking out from between his teeth. He’s making a high-pitched wheezing sound as he reaches into his coat.

‘Which would you like first?’ He holds out his hands to show her. A small shiny silver-and-black case. Or a folding knife with a wooden handle.

‘Can’t decide?’ He flicks the catch on the lighter, the flame springing up like a jack-in-the-box, and snaps it off again. ‘This: to remember me.’ Then he unhasps the blade of the folding knife. ‘This is just what needs to be done.’

She tries to kick out, to dislodge him, screaming in fury against the ball. He lets her, watching her. Amused. Then he sets the lighter against her eye socket and digs the hard edge in against her broken cheekbone. Black spots bloom in her head, pain arcing through her jaw, down her spine.

He pulls up her T-shirt, exposing her skin, winter-pale. He drags his hand across her stomach, his fingertips digging into her skin, clutching, greedy, leaving bruises. Then he punches the knife into her abdominal wall and twists and pulls it across in a jagged cut, following the trajectory of his hand. She bucks up against him, screaming into the ball.

He laughs. ‘Easy there.’

She is sobbing something incoherent. The words dont’t make sense in her head, let alone in her mouth. Don’t-please-don’t-don’t-you-f*ckingdare-don’t-don’t-please-don’t..

Their breathing is evenly matched, his excited wheezes, her rabbit inhalations. The blood is hotter than she would have ever imagined, like pissing yourself. Thicker. Maybe he is done. Maybe it’s over. He only wanted to hurt her a little. Show her who’s boss before – her mind blanks at the possibilities. She can’t bring herself to look at him. She’s too afraid of seeing his intention in his face. So she lies there, looking up at the pallid morning sun glancing through the leaves, listening to their breathing, hard and fast.

But he’s not done yet. She groans and tries to twist away before the tip of the blade even touches her skin. He pats her shoulder, grinning savagely, his hair plastered down and sweaty from the exertion. ‘Scream louder, sweetheart,’ he says hoarsely. His breath smells like caramel. ‘Maybe someone will hear you.’

He slides the knife home and twists it across. She screams as loudly as she can, the sound muffled by the ball, and instantly despises herself for obeying him. And then grateful that he let her. Which makes the shame worse. She can’t help it. Her body is a separate animal to her mind, which is a shameful, bargaining thing, willing to do anything to make it stop. Anything to live. Please, God. She closes her eyes, so she doesn’t have to see his look of concentration or the way he tugs at his pants.

He yanks the knife down and then up in a pattern that seems predetermined. Like being here is, surely, trapped beneath him. Like this is the only place she has ever been. Under the sharp sear of the wounds, she can feel the blade catching on the fatty tissue. Like carving f*cking sirloin. An abattoir smell of blood and shit. Please-please-please.

There is a terrible noise, worse even than his breathing or the meaty tearing sound of the knife. She opens her eyes and turns her head to see Tokyo, shaking and twisting his head, like he’s having a fit. He’s snarling and growling through the wreck of his throat. His lips pulled back to reveal the red foam on his teeth. The whole log shakes with the movement. The wire saws into the branch it’s been looped around, bits of bark and lichen flaking away. Bright bubbles of blood bead his fur like an obscene necklace.

‘Don’t,’ she manages. It comes out ‘Ownt’.

He thinks she’s talking to him. ‘It’s not my fault, sweetheart,’ he says. ‘It’s yours. You shouldn’t shine. You shouldn’t make me do this.’ He moves the knife to her neck. He doesn’t see Tokyo yank himself free until the dog is right on top of him. The dog launches itself at him, clamping his teeth into his arm through the coat. The blade jerks across her throat, too shallow, only nicking the carotid, before he drops it.

The man howls in fury and tries to shake the animal off, but Tokyo’s jaws are locked tight. The weight drags him down. He feels around for the knife with his other hand. Kirby tries to roll over it. She’s too slow and uncoordinated. He grabs it out from under her and then Tokyo gives a long rasping sigh and he’s prying her dog away from his arm, yanking at the knife stuck in his neck.

Any fight she had left goes out of her. She closes her eyes and tries to play dead, the act belied by the tears running down her cheeks.

He crawls over to her, cradling his arm. ‘You’re not fooling me,’ he says. He pokes his finger diagnostically into the wound in her throat and she screams again, blood pulsing out.

‘You’ll bleed out quick enough.’

He reaches into her mouth and yanks the tennis ball out, squashing it between his fingers. She bites him as hard as she can, grinding her teeth into his thumb. More blood in her mouth, but it’s his this time. He punches her in the face and she blacks out for a moment.

It’s a shock coming back. The pain slams down as soon as she opens her eyes, like Wile E. Coyote’s anvil on her head. She starts weeping. The f*cker is limping away, holding his crutch loosely in one hand. He stops, his back to her, digging in his pocket. ‘Almost forgot,’ he says. He tosses the lighter at her. It lands in the grass near her head.

Kirby lies there, waiting to die. For the pain to stop. But she doesn’t and it doesn’t, and then she hears Tokyo give a little grunt, like he’s not dead either, and she starts getting seriously pissed off. F*ck him.

She shifts her weight onto her hip and swivels her wrists experimentally, reawakening the nerves that blast her brain with a shrieking morse code. He’s been sloppy. It’s a short-term measure, to hold her, not keep her, especially with her weight off. Her fingers are too numb to work properly, but the blood makes it easier. WD40 for bondage, she thinks and laughs, bitterly, surprising herself.

F*ck this.

She painstakingly works one hand free and then passes out when she tries to sit up. It takes her four minutes to get up onto her knees. She knows because she counts the seconds. It’s the only way she can force herself to stay conscious. She wraps her jacket round her waist to try to staunch the blood. She can’t tie it. Her hands are shaking too much, her fine motor skills shot. So she tucks it into the back of her jeans as best she can.

She kneels next to Tokyo, who rolls his eyes at her and tries to wag his tail. She lifts him up, levering him onto her forearms and then hefting him up to her chest. And almost drops him.

She staggers towards the path and the sound of the waves, her dog in her arms. His tail thuds weakly against her thigh. ‘It’s okay, boy, we’re nearly there,’ she says. Her throat makes a horrible garling sound when she speaks. Blood pulses down her neck, soaking into her T-shirt. Gravity feels terrible. Increased a millionfold. Not the weight of her dog, his fur matted with blood. The weight of the world. She feels something come loose from her middle, hot and slippery. She can’t think about it.

‘Nearly there. Nearly there.’

The trees open out onto a cement path that leads to the pier. The fisherman is still there. ‘Help,’ she rasps, but too soft for him to hear.

‘HELP ME,’ she screams and the fisherman turns and gapes, misfiring the sinker from the pipe so that the red ball bounces off the cement between the husks of discarded shad. ‘What in hell?’ He drops his rod and yanks a wooden baton from the cart. He runs towards her, brandishing it above his head. ‘Who did this to you? Where is he? Help! Somebody! Ambulance! Police!’

She buries her face in Tokyo’s fur. She realizes he’s not wagging his tail. Hasn’t been this whole time.

It was physics. The jolt of every step. Equal and opposite reaction.

The knife is still sticking out the side of his neck. It’s so deeply wedged in his vertebrae, the vet will have to remove it surgically, rendering it almost unusable for forensics. It’s what saved her from the man pulling it out and finishing the job.

No please, but she’s crying too hard to say it.