فصل 51

51

JULES

I waited in the kitchen for Lena to come home—I rang her phone, I left voice mail messages. I fretted hopelessly, and in my head you scolded me for not going after her, like you’d gone after me. You and I, we tell our stories differently. I know that, because I’ve read your words: When I was seventeen, I saved my sister from drowning. You were heroic, without context. You didn’t write about how I got there, about the football game, or the blood, or Robbie.

Or the pool. When I was seventeen, I saved my sister from drowning, you say, but what a selective memory you have, Nel! I can still feel your hand on the back of my neck, I can still remember fighting against you, the agony of airless lungs, the cold panic when, even in my stupid, hopeless, drunken stupor, I knew I was going to drown. You held me there, Nel.

Not for long. You changed your mind. With your arm locked around my neck, you dragged me towards the bank, but I’ve always known that there was some part of you that wanted to leave me there.

You told me never to talk about it, you made me promise, for Mum’s sake, and so I put it away. I suppose I always thought that one day, far into the future, when we were old and you were different, when you were sorry, we’d return to it. We’d talk about what happened, about what I did and what you did, about what you said and how we ended up hating each other. But you never said that you were sorry. And you never explained to me how it was that you could have treated me, your little sister, the way you did. You never changed, you just went and died, and I feel like my heart has been ripped out of my chest.

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’s voice 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 voice mail. 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.