He had protected her. Had kept her safe against a world that might have taken her away.
And she had taken that time – that last gift – and what had she done with it?
She knew her dad hadn’t understood the games she’d played. Why she’d spend all her time in other worlds than this one.
She didn’t do it for fun.
Pretending, it was all she’d had.
She’d found the horses at 5 a.m. not because she woke that early, but because she rarely went to sleep before six. She’d been awake when the phone call had come, telling her to go outside.
When the voice of the man who had once filmed her on her birthday, who had walked with her in woods and distant places, came back at last.
The voice was sorry for all the messages.
Everything they had done would be for nothing, if she didn’t come outside.
So Rebecca had gone.
She hadn’t known how to argue.
She’d taken the dog with her that night, not for a walk.
She’d taken it because she’d been afraid.
She’d gone out towards the eyes in the earth.
She’d gone out, and she knew it, now, all these weeks later – the doctors telling her about the new life that awaited her in the morning, about the foster parents, about a place at school once more – she knew, now, deep in her bones.
Her father had found it in himself to love her, this past year.
And she’d killed him, hadn’t she?
All of these people . . .
It was all her fault.
Day Thirty-Nine
CHAPTER SEVENTY-TWO
Rebecca followed the rest of the road, having been dropped off by her foster father and mother. She insisted on walking the rest of the way, even if she still felt weak – how else would she get better? Grey and potted, warped with every heatwave and every round of frost, the road snaked past abandoned factories, uninhabited and unused for at least fifty years. To the edge of the woodland, green like Christmas trees, like ponds.
After weeks of illness, a year after her father had begun to home-educate her, Rebecca was going back to school. They’d thought it might be good for her, take her mind off things: she’d only known these foster people for a few days but already they’d created a rota for her, had pulled strings to get her three days at school before it closed for Christmas.
Once she’d dreamt of having a different family.
These people were pleasant but quiet, absorbed mostly by their end-of-year accounts, and Rebecca quickly felt – even in the span of a few days – like one more column in a spreadsheet. They hadn’t noticed how she’d—
She—
She walked on.
The trees were separated from the school’s own fields by a chain-link fence along their far edge. In places the roots had pushed the land up, had made the metal warp and flex towards the sky. In other places children had used to climb over the fence or force their way through holes, out to play in the trees, to smoke, to go far away. There were rumours people had sex in those woods.
Along the playground edge there were other trees, deciduous, leafless oaks that crested the whole boundary. They rustled in the low wind. There was no one else in sight. She’d got there early.
It was the first time she’d been to this place in over a year. She didn’t even know if she’d do her GCSEs or not. They hadn’t said anything either way.
How did you find the horses? Why were you out so early?
Why did you touch one?
Did you see or hear something strange?
Do you know why someone would want to do this?
A crow screamed from the chain-link.
She walked into the playground. There were grids for cars, but cars were never allowed to park here, not normally, but for parent evenings. Sometimes car boot sales, too, every other weekend in the summer. Townspeople and parents would sell old DVDs and board games and other flotsam from their homes. Her mother and father had once sold their things here, back when they’d still thought they could tame Well Farm, that they could let go and clear space.
She went inside, the doors unlocked, the long metal bars cold to her touch. The hallways already had their lights on, sterile fluorescence reflecting on the cheap shiny floors. Images splayed themselves across the white walls. There were old headmasters, all men. Photos of football teams, of rugby. Some posters by the Year 9s. A few old trophies in a cabinet. The hatch for reception was closed. It all felt smaller than she’d remembered it. It all felt minuscule, shrunken in the wash.
She went to the girls’ bathroom, passing row after row of orange lockers. She shut the door and approached the mirrors. She looked at her face, lit up by the light. There were no windows. Her face was caught in a mix of shadow and freckle. She’d put her hair up in a ponytail before she’d left. It was how she’d always worn it at school before. It was ridiculous but she wondered if things were different, a year later, if this was somehow wrong.
She played with her ponytail, trying to look right. She pulled it round so it tangled over her shoulder.
It looked like a tail. Like the twist of a snake.
She pulled the band off, letting it all hang loose. She brushed it behind her ears. She went into a stall, shut the door, and sat with her new phone in her hands. She sent messages until people could be heard in the corridor.
She opened the door and went to class.
CHAPTER SEVENTY-THREE
Rebecca was early to school, in the classroom without permission.
She removed a print-out of a poem from her backpack. She took her red water bottle out and put it on the table in front of her. The whole place smelt of pencil sharpening. She had been told to make notes on this piece. They had emailed it to her. She did not know if other people would have gone through this poem already, or if she was being keen. So she read it and made her notes. They were going to do one prepared poem and one unseen piece.
No one had really remained in touch with her after she had begun home-schooling. They said they would, but they didn’t. She had a few friends on the internet that she did not really care about. The few friends she did care about fell silent after initial bursts of enthusiasm about meeting up and doing stuff together. Her father had refused to drive her into town, most times she asked.
Other people began to enter the room. A few faces she recognized, a few names. Falling out of touch with people was worse than never knowing them.
To have drifted apart was a limbo, a shadow of the thing you once had been to another, and what they had once been to you. You couldn’t sit next to a ghost.
So Rebecca ended up sitting alone in that classroom, even as dozens arrived and spread across the seats. Even as some looked at her, even as they smiled and whispered, even as the final few were forced to come close, clearly not wanting to. She sat alone, not knowing a thing but the words on the page in front of her.
They talked about the prepared poem for eight minutes. ‘Porphyria’s Lover’. A piece by Robert Browning about two lovers who held each other, who wanted the moment to last forever, so the man took the other’s hair and strangled her with it.
They talked about the life of the writer. The ways it could be interpreted. That the speaker of the poem was most likely mad, and with such madness, whether he could truly have loved the woman he was holding, or if it was possession he sought through her murder.
In the year since she had left school, Rebecca had not read any poems that were not in her game. She had not been asked to.
They had twenty minutes to write some additional answers in their workbooks, and then the unseen poem came up on the interactive whiteboard in front of the class.
‘Stopping by woods on a snowy evening’.
They were going to go along as before and read a line each.
The work began with the poet standing before a forest, before trees owned by a local man. The poet thought it was unlikely he would be spotted here, since the land’s owner live
d in town, away from this property, from this lonely road. The poet knew he should not be seen watching the man’s trees, his possessions. The night was almost silent. The snow rested among the trees, settling on each branch, each root, each hidden creature.
The next line was about a horse.
Or, more specifically, how the poet’s horse probably found it strange to stop like this so far from any human habitation, near a lake, on this coldest, blackest night. Except it wasn’t the horse that thought it strange – it was the poet, expressing his ideas through the imagination of an animal. Animals didn’t think things were strange. Animals didn’t think at all.
But something was wrong, wasn’t it? Something was wrong with the person speaking.
It wasn’t Robert Frost who spoke, at least not now. He had lived and died long ago, leaving this creation, words on a page that couldn’t speak. All these voices, they existed only in the reader’s mind.
It was them. Rebecca, her teacher, this whole class . . . they were much like the horse itself: imagined proxies for an abandoned thought, dancing in a mirror in a mirror in a mirror. The old words skipped through time. When they read aloud, they were puppets of the dead.
She imagined the man’s hands in her skull, moving her neck, opening her jaw.
From across the class, a girl turned briefly, looking right at her. The expression on her face was different from all the others.
Rebecca picked up her water bottle and drank.
Then the horse asked if something had gone wrong. There was no answer but its own asking, and the soft fall of snow in the breeze.
Her father had slapped her across the face, a month before he had died.
They focused a lot on Frost’s final lines.
The woods are lovely, dark and deep,
But I have promises to keep,
And miles to go before I sleep,
And miles to go before I sleep.
‘What is this poem about?’ the teacher asked.
No one answered.
‘What do you think it is about?’
No one answered.
The teacher, frustrated, began to talk through the poem. She told them that on the surface, it seems like it is about a man and his animal, going through the dark, maybe a little lonely, eager to get home.
She asked people how it made them feel.
‘Sad for him,’ a boy said. His voice made Rebecca go cold. It had changed, these past months.
‘Why do you feel sad for him, Peter?’
‘It’s – it’s like you said. He seems lonely. His horse seems kind of, I don’t know, it seems worried about him.’
Something about Peter made Rebecca want to run, to cry.
‘Why would his horse seem worried about him?’ the teacher asked.
‘He’s thinking of going into the woods,’ said her former friend. ‘It’s dark and cold.’
‘The darkest night of the year,’ the teacher said. ‘What could happen to him?’
No one answered.
‘What’s the worst that could happen to him?’
‘He could die,’ another boy finally said, across the room.
‘Yes.’ The teacher nodded. ‘He could die. So what do you think this poem is about?’
No one answered.
The teacher looked around the room.
‘If he knows he could die, if his horse is concerned about him – or if he is acting as if his horse is that concerned, if his mindset is that distorted that he can apply compassion to other, non-human creatures, but not towards himself, then what could be going on here? What is he thinking about?’
Rebecca stared at the screen. Her eyes were dry for staring, pinned in place, unable to move.
She thought about her carriage ride, long ago along the shore.
She thought about birthdays.
The camcorder, watching her from the street.
She thought of all that had been done to her, all she had done in turn, and all that remained.
‘Suicide,’ she said. ‘The poem is about suicide.’
CHAPTER SEVENTY-FOUR
[08.51] Alec: What else did your husband believe?
[08:52] Grace: That I’m a bad person.
[08:52] Grace: An unfit mother.
[08:53] Grace: Probably that the world is flat.
[08:54] Grace: I don’t know.
[08:55] Alec: Is that why you left?
[09:03] Grace: Did I leave because the world is flat?
[09:04] Alec: Because of what he felt about you.
[09:05] Alec: You left your daughter. You left your whole life.
[09:05] Alec: Why did you do it?
[09:06] Grace: What would you have done?
[09:07] Alec: I would have tried to do what was right.
[09:07] Grace: And what’s right?
[09:07] Grace: How do you know what’s right?
CHAPTER SEVENTY-FIVE
Once, nine hotels had been located around Ilmarsh.
Five had been repurposed for council housing and temporary accommodation over the last few decades, while two, beyond the point of repair and economic benefit, had been left untouched for the homeless and the lost.
The company responsible for the conversion of the unused hotels was part-owned, following the severance of the majority of its foreign contracts, by the government itself. The shares were to be sold off soon at a likely loss and would be bought up by the friends of those politicians who had made the decision to sell.
The buildings in this distant town leaked humanity. People left every day, not wanting to live here any more. So other distant cities sent people they did not want, by train and by coach. It sent them to the emptiness, to the towers.
Beds and tables were crammed into spaces far too small. The walls between rooms had been altered to form inner doors. The people who came here had arrived from across the country, from other countries, too. They were told to be excited. They were going to see the sea.
Vulnerable people were told housing would be given to them not where they lived, not where they knew people or loved people, but here, and only here. They would come, these strangers, and find themselves giddy, sometimes, happy at the whimsy of the buildings, at the small shops packed full of candy and inflatables and sand shovels no one ever really bought from muttering old men who never really said anything. It was as if the government had sent them on a form of holiday.
Few of these temporary residents could ever afford to leave that cold sea and its side. There were no jobs, though to qualify for their benefits, they completed the work of the council. They helped pave. They helped dredge. They cleaned the streets of moss and syringes and sand and blood for less than minimum wage. Sometimes they drowned. There was something in Ilmarsh that grew into agony. Old couples lived out the dream of their lonely retirement in surprising, awful silence, barely able to heat their homes.
There was a sign outside.
THE WHITE ROOMS.
Cooper and Alec stepped up to its doorway, its old name visible only by the torn lettering, the shadows those words had left behind in the paint.
CHAPTER SEVENTY-SIX
Rebecca’s foster parents had agreed to let them speak with her if they could wait to let her settle into her new life a bit.
‘Just give her a few days.’
Now they went inside the tower to find a lobby full of cracked tiles, a checkerboard pattern of black and white. There were awful rolled-up red curtains behind what had once been a front desk, and which now stored only boxes of God knew what.
‘Which room?’ Alec asked.
‘I don’t know.’
‘It’s on your phone.’ Alec craned his neck around as she spoke, sniffing the air.
‘It’s on your phone, too,’ Cooper said. ‘Check your own phone.’
He grimaced and got his mobile phone out. It always annoyed her when people did things like this. When they wanted the time from you, forced you to act, when there would be just as little effort to find it themselve
s.
‘Third floor, number thirty-nine,’ he said.
They went over to the elevator. There were no signs warning it was out of order, but they hesitated.
‘What do you think?’ Cooper asked.
‘The stairs would be safer.’
‘Are you sure?’
Alec nodded.
If they used the elevator, they could be stuck for hours, or worse.
‘It’s only three floors,’ Alec said.
Only three floors.
Cooper kept pace, ready to help him if he stumbled.
He had to pause halfway through the second flight. ‘It’s OK,’ he said, seemingly as much to himself as to her.
They went up through the dust, the spray-paint on the walls, black bags of rubbish lying openly outside doors.
On the third floor, they came to number thirty-nine, and knocked.
CHAPTER SEVENTY-SEVEN
When Simon was ten, he’d found his mother throwing up in the sink. She’d been so careful about what she ate. She had grown thinner and thinner, until one day she had left him and his father for a couple of weeks.
Alec knew these things not because Elizabeth had told him, but because his wife had left behind diaries after her death.
When his wife came back to the house after her few weeks away, there were no pills or diets. She began to cook more again. She took up meat, though when Simon asked about it she’d go quiet, she’d seem guilty, on-and-off as she had been, and Alec would change the subject.
Alec kept saying how proud he was of his wife.
He’d sit there, making comments about the women on television in turn. He’d talk sometimes about their bodies. He did what anyone did.
She’d been worried, sometimes, that Simon didn’t eat enough. That he was too thin, that he’d leave food on his plate, that he’d refuse cake on birthdays and drink only water. She managed to wean him from some of this behaviour throughout his teens, and in trying to help him be better, she helped herself. The impulse never entirely left him, though, however big and strong he grew, and it haunted his mother, to know she might have sparked it in him. That something he had seen might have damaged him. You didn’t know – you just didn’t know—
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