The Eighth Girl

by Maxine Mei-Fung Chung

  The phone rings.

  “PC Keith Chandler is here to see you,” the Receptionist says, efficient and quick.

  “Send him in,” I say.

  79

  Alexa Wú

  Paper Tigers are circling me.

  Knowing I’m lost, they release a roar, their thick bodies twisting.

  Where are my sneakers? I wonder, noticing my soiled feet covered in brick-colored dust.

  The Paper Tigers move closer. Starvation in their eyes.

  With no gods to play witness to the Tigers’ carnage, I fear I’m alone. I watch a glob of one Tiger’s phlegm fall and land in the dust, leaving a patch of congealed goo. A sickness emerges inside me.

  Another Tiger approaches. Larger. More muscular. His orange paper neck as thick as my waist. I recognize him as the paternal one who lowered his hand across my mouth.

  “Why?” I ask.

  “Because I could, Xiǎo Wáwa.”

  The Tiger speaks truth.

  I look away.

  It is not until I hear the crack in the sky—a flock of pink-footed geese rattled and taking flight from the strike of light—that I realize the gods have not in fact left. They have been here all along. The sky, dark and relentless, finally opening. With another flash of light, the weather unleashes on the origami tigers. Paper eventually buckling under the rain’s falling weight.

  I open my arms, grateful for spring. The Paper Tigers’ markings disappearing slowly—drip, drip, dripping black stripes smudging and smearing across neat folds before they eventually collapse.

  A mound of wet mush.

  Releasing held breath, I walk over and grind my bare heels into the orange pulp. A paper tail. A claw.

  The Paper Tigers are gone now. Stricken snarls lowered in their paws.

  All around me: the sound of honking and cackling geese.

  I kneel before them, a chosen bow of the head. Words escaping my mouth and speaking to the sky, where I imagine us flying together. A Flock.

  Suddenly, I hear my father’s words in my head: It’s better to have geese than girls, which I quickly replace with the beginning of a new song.

  A song to oppose, the Swan Song.

  A song that celebrates life.

  When I awake, Oneiroi is waiting for me.

  She smiles, eases my numb feet into hospital slippers, waffled and white. Still stoned under Glendown’s chemical cosh, my head is thick, my tongue a little fried.

  Nurse Veal approaches, takes my arm; careful to make sure the white blanket covers the opening on the back of my loosely tied smock.

  “Come with me,” she says.

  Daniel is seated opposite me.

  I lift my head, attempting a smile that unfortunately doesn’t materialize. The muscles in my face not yet up to speed with my brain. Should I find it in me to smile, there is every possibility my mood might improve, but as bad luck has it, I cannot. I am a dribbling fool.

  The stagnant dream is still with me, the Paper Tigers clear in my mind: flat and destroyed. Their orange mush now hallucinated and sinking into the blue and purple stripes between us.

  Daniel reaches down and adjusts the rug—its corner curled—an orange paw oscillating back and forth into the morphing hand of a man. He looks up eventually to see me blinking.

  “How are you feeling?” he finally asks, his voice soft and low.

  “Like crap,” I muster, “you?”

  He smiles, his head tipping to the side just a little. “That was some protest back there,” he says.

  “And that was some heavy shit you had Nurse Veal stick in my arm.”

  A pause.

  “I’m sorry,” he says.

  I give my body permission to slump while another warm dribble of phlegm escapes my awkward mouth. I imagine I must look how I feel: god-awful. But I don’t care too much, given my current state. My eyes strain to reach the small gold clock.

  I turn my attention to Daniel, trying to recall the fateful night’s events: the DVD, the bridge, the police car, and the questioning. I feel Runner rousing, her arms wrapped tightly around Dolly’s waist.

  Go back to sleep, I say.

  Medication wearing off, I clear my throat.

  “How long have I been here?” I ask.

  “Two days,” Daniel says, uncrossing his legs. “One of the other personalities must have taken over the Body after questioning. We had to sedate you.”

  “We agreed that I would reduce my medication. Remember?” I say.

  “You entered a psychotic episode. You needed more, Alexa. You were very confused.”

  “You pride yourself on being a man of your word, yes?” I challenge.

  “I do.”

  “You failed,” I say.

  He falls silent and leans forward, tears casting a glaze across his eyes. “You tried to jump off a bridge,” he says.

  His words spike the air and swirl, like birds.

  I reach out my arm like the branch of a tree, my hand and its palm facing the floor. Each word landing to rest:

  You—a goose

  Tried—a starling

  To—a nightingale

  Jump—a skylark

  Off—a sparrow

  A—a phoenix

  Bridge—a blackbird

  Daniel looks at me, puzzled, noticing my floating arm and unaware that his words are landed there and resting.

  “Alexa?”

  I lean toward my wafting arm and blow. His words slowly soaring toward the veil of drooping wisteria outside and scattering across the dew-coated lawn. The promise of morning about to break captured among apple trees, soon to be home for clattering birds and their song.

  80

  Daniel Rosenstein

  She closes her eyes, her arm still raised in the air. A single tear traveling down her cheek.

  For a second time, she blows on her hand, and I think this a spontaneous act but then wonder if she’s hallucinating. Or simply releasing her feelings? Her breath a way of exhaling Monday night’s sordid events.

  As I wait, my heart starts jackhammering. Breathe, Daniel, I tell myself. Breathe.

  A lingering silence.

  She opens her jade-green eyes. They are softened and fatigued.

  “Why didn’t you tell me Anna and Ella and Grace are part of the Flock?” I speak quietly.

  She blinks. “I needed to feel I had some control over who I brought here and who I kept away.”

  “I don’t think that’s entirely true, Alexa,” I challenge. “You had no control over Ella. You cast her out just like Flo, the personality who killed that guinea pig, remember, when you were sixteen years old.”

  She looks away, hurt. “You’re right. It was just like Flo,” she allows. “I cast out both of them because I despised their behavior. Flo was violent and Ella was weak. I felt ashamed of Ella’s greed, and yes, I know greed comes from deprivation, but still. She was so sexualized and needy, but it was her lack of integrity I hated most. I completely exiled her from the Body, which she’d enter when I was in complete denial or had checked out. My other personalities didn’t dare to challenge or tell me, just like the time they didn’t expose Flo. I think they must have thought I’d banish them too.”

  “I don’t understand,” I say. “You had me believe Ella was your best friend?”

  “She is. Was. But as we got older things changed. She started to use the Body to manipulate. I didn’t like it. It scared me.”

  “You mean you didn’t accept these qualities in yourself?”

  She hesitates. “Yes.”

  “You know, one of my tasks is to encourage the reclamation of all your exiled parts. That includes Flo and Ella.”

  She looks at me, her gaze steady.

  “And my task?” she asks.

  “To stay alive in the process.”

  She presses on her chest with the palm of her hand, I think to calm her fast heart.

  “And what about Anna?” I say.

  She shrugs.

  “So long as
I came to therapy she didn’t care much for coming herself. I was happy with that too. Part of me wanted to try to forget what passed between my father and me, and I was worried that if I brought Anna here you’d analyze the extent of the abuse and why she was created. That bothered me.”

  She removes her palm, rests it now on her knee.

  “Part of you didn’t trust me,” I say. “If you had, you might have realized I would do only what was best for you—and the Flock.”

  “Some of us thought you’d try and muscle in on my plan,” she adds, “or convince me to stop gathering evidence against Navid. I couldn’t have that. I had to make sure he didn’t hurt any more girls.”

  “I understand,” I say. “Your revenge might seem justified after all your years of hurting. This is not to dismiss Navid’s sordid crimes, but it’s unlikely you would have found yourself involved with the Electra had you not suffered at the hands of your father.”

  She takes a sip of water. “I just couldn’t face who I really was, what Anna, Ella, or I were doing—or had done—with my father, or Navid, the club, everything . . .”

  Her sentence trails off, too much to bear.

  “You’re Alexa,” I finally say, “ornithologist to the Flock. Someone who has done her absolute best to nurture parts of herself under heinous circumstances. Someone who knitted a family of personalities to survive. Your past doesn’t have to define who you are, Alexa, but it can inform who you might wish to be. With time.”

  We look at each other.

  “Do you still think you are mad?” I ask.

  She smiles slowly, wearing the face of a girl who survived the Jump.

  “I’d say I’m someone who has suffered a great deal and misses her mother terribly,” she says. “Someone who is strong, with fight at her core. The kind of person I needed when I was younger.”

  Epilogue

  I didn’t hear the police car edge up behind me. Someone stepping out.

  A man appeared, spoke to me real simple, and eventually had it all make sense. His voice was gentle and considered. Rivaling those in my head, particularly the Fouls—Jump, you fucking crybaby.

  Finally coaxed down from the ledge, I was driven in the pouring rain to a police station, PC Keith Chandler taking his time, swerving around blips in the road. Going easy on the clutch. He was careful to speak softly, noticing my bloodshot eyes, a tremble in my limbs. My leggings still wet and reeking of urine.

  In a square fluorescent-lit room at the police station, a female officer with a half smile joined us at an oblong table. I suspected her to be just a little judgmental. A slight flicker to her eyes when Runner emptied the rucksack of its entire contents.

  She stared at me: an alternate personality destroying a criminal underworld from the inside.

  Suddenly overcome, I gave a statement. Well, Oneiroi did, with Ella’s help. I stepped back into the Body, thinking she might articulate better the sequence of events. I was tired.

  Four hours later I was committed.

  Glendown is home now for a while. At least until the Flock are considered safe enough for flight. Daniel believes my dissociated identities are what saved me. That without them I might not have survived the club or the Groom House, and even though his administering medication mutes their voices, we’re figuring it out, together—the Fouls, of course, remaining our biggest challenge. It’s our hope that one day I’ll integrate a little more—us, we, and them taking on the curious shape of an I.

  Because I can mean any one of the eight personalities—nine, including me—that I’ve gathered over the years. I, the Nest Builder. But in this, I have not lost sight of the girl who was born and named, the one growing and learning person I know as Alexa Wú.

  The Electra, along with the Groom House, eventually slipped off the front pages of local newspapers. Then, when the arrests were made, hacks wrote hyped headlines: human traffickers arrested in the east end: 15 women rescued.

  They got the “women” part wrong. Most of them were girls.

  Another claimed: police arrest 11 people involved in pedophile ring as sex worker tips off local police.

  The subheading named Navid Mahal and Cassie Wang as the ringleaders, the story accompanied by a black-and-white photograph of Navid, Cassie, and Shaun, handcuffed, outside the Electra. Its pink neon light killed. Each had been taken in a separate police car, the crowns of their fallen heads forced down further as they stepped inside. In the end, Navid had shown his vulgarity by turning around and giving his fame the middle finger, a nasty curl to his lip. A week later there were more photographs. Of Annabelle and Amy and their brother, who gave testimony to Navid’s hit-and-run. Of Jane—though no Sylvie—with a new hairstyle, no longer red but blond. They all still wore their gold necklaces, a key dangling from each—their longing and childhood wounds heartbreakingly and infuriatingly unresolved. I wondered if the authorities caught up with Tao Wang and what had become of Poi-Poi. Had she been sent back to China?

  That was five weeks ago, when I believed myself destined for Jumpers Bridge or a life of crime. The Flock splintering into warring parts as protection against our pain. Who knew how much trouble we’d get ourselves in? The risks we would take. How justice and revenge would take over like some rabid beast, those helpless girls reminding me of all the times I too had my voice silenced. Unheard. A sense of powerlessness felt for so long.

  So few people tell you there are other choices. That you can change the story. That we’re not a fixed product of our past. That there’s a way to reclaim the many frightened, exiled parts of ourselves. That we’re not worthless, or stupid; or; or; or.

  Instead they gaslight.

  And lie.

  And shark.

  And groom.

  But they’re wrong.

  We will triumph.

  Acknowledgments

  My gratitude to all those who helped build a village during the delightfully long and sometimes lonely development of The Eighth Girl. To everyone at William Morrow and HarperCollins, especially my editor, Liz Stein, who got it, got me, enchanted me with her bull’s-eye edits, and made this story wildly better.

  To Bill Clegg, my dazzling agent, who has my eternal adoration and respect, and without whom this novel would surely not exist.

  To Eugenie Furniss, who believed in my very early words and patiently walked beside me as more and more words followed.

  And to Molly Gendell at William Morrow and Laura Cherkas, whose assistance and final editing was nothing short of amazing.

  My family: Yvonne and John Prendeville, and in particular my brothers, Martyn Chung and Mark Mak. I thank you for both your love and divine sense of humor.

  To my wonderful friends, champions, and readers, whom I neglected when writing took over, especially Dr. Kirsty Rowan and Toni Horton. Also: Chi Chi Izundu, Charlotte Henson, Carolyn Roberts, Christine Blake, Greg Horton, Susannah Nwaka, Violet Nwaka, Harriet Tyce, Louise Hare, Ann Russell, and Andy Darley—all of whom encouraged me by offering fair and just insight and unshakable friendship.

  To Cosmo Landesman, whose zeal inspired me to cut loose my reins of funk and suggested I find a way, any way, to write. To David Matthews, who kept me sane by reminding me gently that the personal is always political. And my dear friend and guide Joanna Briscoe for our time spent together at the Faber Academy—kidnapping characters.

  Also to my patients, past and present, who show up and are curious and questioning of their lives and with immense generosity share their stories with me. You are all fierce and gentle, brave and committed, and the heroes and heroines of my every day. Thank you, I am still learning.

  My clinical supervisor, Judy Yellin, whose generosity of spirit and razor-sharp analysis enabled me to practice effectively while I ventured into a fictional world of dissociation and held me throughout.

  And my beautiful son, Dexter Landesman, who was just nine years old when this all began and now as a teenager rightly earns the accolade of portrait of a young man with most patience.
/>   Finally, thank you to Joe, comrade and tender giant from whom I learn most things and who dared me to struggle and dared me to win, and then asked . . . If not now, when?

  About the Author

  MAXINE MEI-FUNG CHUNG is a psychoanalytic psychotherapist, clinical supervisor, and training psychotherapist. She lectures on trauma, gender and sexuality, clinical dissociation, and attachment theory at the Bowlby Centre and was awarded the Jafar Kareem Bursary for her work supporting people from ethnic minorities experiencing isolation and mental health problems.

  Originally trained in the arts, she previously worked as a creative director for ten years at Condé Nast, the Sunday Times, and the Times (London).

  Maxine completed the Faber Academy advanced novel-writing course and currently works in private practice, where she has a particular interest in the creative feminine, advocating for women and girls finding a voice. She lives in London with her son. The Eighth Girl is her debut novel.

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  Copyright

  Grateful acknowledgment is made to Mark Alexander for his translation of Du Fu’s poem “The Solitary Goose.”

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously and are not to be construed as real. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, organizations, or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

  the eighth girl. Copyright © 2020 by Maxine Mei-Fung Chung. All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the nonexclusive, nontransferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse-engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins e-books.