Manatee. The name thundered through her head like a train in a tunnel. Only John could have told her about that. How else would she have known? He must have remembered Juliet teasing her all those years ago in the department store café.
She imagined John describing his fat ugly sister. The Manatee. Everyone made fun of her at school, and now she was a sad old virgin, all alone with no one to love. How that nasty little bitch must have shrieked and cackled with glee!
Violetta’s laughter echoed around the cellar and then suddenly stopped. Marion didn’t realize she had hit her until she felt her hand strike that sharp little nose. The girl screamed, more in outrage than pain. “Oh, oh my gosh, sorry!” Marion said automatically, as if she had trodden on someone’s foot in a crowd.
Sonya began bouncing her legs and bottom around on her mattress and making a whining noise through her nose. Marion’s heart banged against her ribs like someone desperate to escape a locked room. She had to get upstairs before she fainted, but first the gag must be put back on Violetta, otherwise the girl would scream all night long and someone would most certainly hear.
As she stepped onto the mattress to replace the gag, Violetta swung her chained legs sideways, knocking Marion off her feet. She fell forwards, landing across the girl’s tough, wriggling body and losing her glasses. The cellar became a muddle of blurry gray shapes. She tried to prop herself up on the mattress, then felt a surge of sharp pain. Violetta was biting into her neck.
“Stop it, stop it,” said Marion, struggling to get away. Violetta was moving around so much, it was impossible to get upright. She struck Violetta across the face with her elbow and then rolled sideways, knocking over the filth bucket and hitting her head against the wall. As she groped around for her glasses she felt the cold vile contents of the bucket soak into her clothes.
She found her glasses by the side of the mattress and got to her feet. There was blood on Violetta’s mouth that Marion realized must have come from her own neck.
“Why didn’t you run away at the service station? Why did you come back? It isn’t my fault. None of this is my fault!”
“It is your fault. It is all your fault. You could have stopped him. You die in prison, you ugly fat witch. Then you go to hell.”
Before she even realized what she was doing, Marion picked up the wooden chair. She swung it at Violetta’s head but missed. She then closed her eyes and brought the side of the chair down hard on her chest. It’s like crushing a spider beneath a book, she told herself, you have to hold it down long enough just to make sure. Finally she lifted up the chair and slammed it down on the girl’s head. A terrible, wet scream could be heard followed by a crunching sound.
For a few seconds after Violetta stopped moving, a sense of relief overcame Marion. Sometimes when you hurt a living thing it could drain away a little of the hurt that was inside you—she had felt this way when she gave Mr. Weinberg’s dog the ham seasoned with rat poison, only a person was more than an animal, so they took away more of the hurt.
As she stood there gasping for breath, she realized Sonya was staring at her.
“I’m sorry,” Marion pleaded. “You know it wasn’t my fault, don’t you? I didn’t mean to hurt anyone—I just reacted—I mean—those cruel, horrible things that she said—I would never have done it on purpose. You know that, don’t you?”
There was terror in the girl’s eyes. No one had ever looked at Marion like that before. All her life she had been ignored, treated as a person of no consequence. Her parents took no interest in her; at school she was invisible; John treated her like a servant. Now, for the first time ever, she was important, she had power, she was the giver of life and death.
? ? ?
THE HORROR OF the cellar formed a dark stain that spread through Marion’s mind, tainting every thought and memory. She plunged her head beneath the surface of the bathwater, tears mingling with the gray suds. When she came up for air, a raw moan escaped her mouth.
“I can’t go back down there, not ever. I would rather go to hell.” Her voice echoed around the dripping bathroom.
“You could still save me.” Sonya’s voice, thin and scorching like an electrified wire, had worked deep into her brain.
“No, I can’t! You don’t understand. I can’t do it. I’m too afraid. I did all I was capable of.”
“Please. Please.”
“Go away!” she screamed. “I did my best, I really did, but I can’t help you. Don’t you see? My nerves just aren’t strong enough to deal with all of this. Now, why won’t you leave me in peace?”
Every single cell in her body opposed going back down there to face those sights and smells. She could call the police, of course, couldn’t she? Tell them to go and rescue Sonya, but if she did that, they would see everything. They would know what she had done to Violetta, and no one would ever understand why.
? ? ?
THE WATER HAD been cold for a long time before she got out of the bath. She dried herself with a large orange bath towel that had belonged to the family since she was a child and was, in places, thin as a bride’s veil.
The only thing she could find to dress the wounds on her neck was a box of tiny plasters. After sticking several of them to her neck and ear with tape, she got into bed.
She woke in the night to find her face stuck to the pillow with dried blood. The memory rose up inside her; all of them, the two dead girls and the baby, all fused into one squirming, purplish-black, glistening thing with Violetta’s sharp little teeth and nightmare mass of foul-smelling hair.
Brendan O’Brian’s words came back to her in full now:
“You are evil, the kind that comes from nothing, from neglect and loneliness. You are like mold that grows in damp dark places, black dirt gathered in corners, a fatal infection that begins with a speck of dirt in an unwashed wound.”
Yes, she said to herself. Somehow he knew.
CLEANING
For the next few days Marion could not bear the thought of going to see John in the hospital. Instead, she began cleaning the house. Starting with the piles of magazines in the hallway, she stuffed them all into big black bags, and then threw the bags out into the back garden. Then she began picking up other pieces of junk at random, tossing things away without even looking to see what they were. Each time she filled a bag she tied it up and dragged it outside. Soon there was a great heap of shiny black plastic. The things that were too heavy for her to lift, she pushed to one side of the dining room. After a while areas of floor began to reappear that she hadn’t seen for several years.
Scrubbing, tidying, dusting, staying busy was the only way she could keep the cellar out of her head. When the white-hot wire of Sonya’s pleading began to sear, Marion would repeat out loud again and again, “It couldn’t be avoided; what happened simply couldn’t be avoided,” until eventually the voice dimmed and faded away altogether. For the first time in her life she slept alone in the house, yet instead of feeling afraid, she was overcome with a sense of relief, as though an abscess, after troubling her for years, had at last been drained.