CHAPTER NINE
It is the sound of Feather’s voice that brings me around. “I’m not a monster, you know. Whatever you think.” My eyelids slide open just enough to see Talon standing in the middle of my room and Feather slumping against the wall, looking as tiny and frail as a bird. Neither of them is looking my way. My arm is at my side. I don’t want to look too closely at my hand. It hurts like hell. The bedsheets must be slick with blood. I can’t imagine how ugly the wound will be. Thankfully, I must have passed out before Feather really began hacking at it. Through bone. Oh. My stomach turns over, and the small slice of world I can see spins. I close my eyes again.
Feather is speaking. “I just want my brother back. Surely, you of all people can understand that.”
“We shouldn’t be hurting her. It won’t help our cause.”
“You still care about that then?”
“How dare you ask me that! Jez was my brother. Marble is my friend. This is just all so messed up. Why did you have to cut her? And what did you do to her hair?”
“She needed a trim.”
“There is something wrong with you.”
Feather laughs. “You heard that prick on TV. We’re doing everything we can, blah, pissing blah. Well, I’m in charge here, not them, and I say they aren’t doing enough. They needed a short, sharp shock, and they got one.”
“This is not what I signed up for. You can’t abuse her like this. It’s disgusting. And immoral!”
“You have the prime minister’s daughter tied up in the basement, and you want to talk to me about morality? Get a grip, Talon. You are doing what you need to do. For your brother. For my brother. Or have you forgotten about them?”
“None of that is her fault.”
“Robyn and her dad aren’t so different. They are part of the same elite. The governing force. She doesn’t care about us.”
“You don’t know her.”
“And you do? Damn it, Talon. This is about more than just your brother. This is about changing the status quo. We are fighting back. Come on! Look at us. Look at what we can achieve. First we get Marble back, and then it’s all going to change. Everything. Him being released will be one almighty finger up to the establishment.”
“But Jez will still be dead.”
Even with my eyes closed, I can sense the tension between them. There’s a long silence, broken only by a single tweet from outside, a sweet twiddle-oo twiddle-eedee.
“I want Marble back as much as you do, but what we’re doing here scares me. It’s too much,” Talon says.
“Everything scares you,” she snaps, but there’s something like disappointment in her voice. When she speaks next, it’s gone, and her tone is efficient and cold, like an elastic band snapping back into place. “Don’t forget who’s in charge here. You’re in too deep now to back out. Trust me. I know what I’m doing. This is just the beginning. We’ll get revenge for Jez. We’ll get revenge for everything.”
Talon cuts in. “Maybe we shouldn’t be talking like this here. She could wake up.”
“I don’t care if she does. A new world is coming, and you and I are going to be right at the heart of it. Those politicians, bankers, and corporate arseholes won’t know what’s hit them. Just look at her. She’s so stupid! No thought in the world that Daddy dearest isn’t perfect. Makes me want to cut off all her fingers . . . Don’t look at me like that. I’m not going to do it. But she makes me so angry. She lives in the seat of power and she doesn’t give a shit about anything. She doesn’t ask real questions. Just, ‘What dress shall I wear to this party?’ I hate people like her. The ignorance. The sense of entitlement.”
“He’s her dad; she trusts him.”
“Well, he’s a lying son of a bitch, and we are going to expose him.”
“We still shouldn’t hurt her anymore. She’s scared.”
“She’s the hostage! Of course she’s scared. What did you expect? But all right . . . all right . . . we won’t hurt her anymore. Maybe get her a blanket and a teddy bear? Read her a bedtime story?”
“Don’t be like this. This isn’t you.”
“This is me! This is exactly who I have always been, Talon. It’s you who’s changed. Now, get a grip. I need you to stop being a pussy and help me get my brother back.”
• • •
I am alone a long while before I muster up the courage to look at my hand. The bandage is so crusted with blood that it’s no longer white but a dirty brown. But that isn’t what surprises me. I peel off the piece of sticky tape holding the wrappings in place and then slowly unravel the gauze. . . . The cut beneath is ugly and deep, but it is just that: a cut. My index finger remains intact, and more amazingly, it is still attached to my left hand. I wiggle it. The wound smarts and bleeds again, but the finger moves easily. I lost consciousness very shortly after she had begun cutting me. I just assumed she had gone through with it. Why didn’t she? Why pretend?
I’m not a monster. Whatever you think.
I realize that it is enough for Dad to think that she’s cut my finger off. She didn’t actually need to do it. And that gives me hope. She could have killed me any number of times, or beaten me, or let Scar attack me, but she hasn’t. She’s shouted at me and hurt me, but she’s never totally lost control. Never done any irreparable damage. Maybe, just maybe, I will survive this.
I flex my finger again, relishing the pain now because it means I still have feeling in it. I still have ten fingers.
• • •
Talon takes me to the bathroom. It is the first time I’ve been out of my cell since Feather cut my hair off. I feel awkward; I keep lowering my chin, expecting my hair to fall around my face like it used to, but of course there isn’t enough of it anymore. And I can’t stop tugging on it, as if that will somehow make it grow. The clump I took from the floor is in my pocket, and I slip my hand inside to hold it.
When we reach the bathroom, Talon tells me not to be too long, but it’s habit now. He lets me take as long as I like. I go inside and stand by the door, looking at the floor. I need to pee, but first I have to see my hair. I’m not brave enough to look yet. It is ten counts before I take my first step, another ten before the second, and a good fifty before I finally manage to force myself to gaze at the mirror.
My hair hangs in dirty tangles down to my ears; it’s shorter in some places and longer in others, but all shorter than my fringe used to be. Without hair framing it, my wide face stretches endlessly, rising to the crest of my nose and then sloping into the dip in my chin. My eyes are larger too: vast, muddy pools in a desert of face and scalp.
Who am I now? Is it really so easy to wipe out a personality? Will this new person that I’ve become still fight with everything she has just to survive one more day, one more minute? Will she hold on even after every tiny shred of hope is gone? Will she protect her little sister with her dying breath if she has to?
The girl in the mirror blinks. She looks tired and lonely and scared. She doesn’t feel like me at all.
I tuck a strand behind my ear, like my mum did on that last day. It immediately falls forward into my eyes again. There’s no trace left of Mum’s shampoo. I want my mum. I want her to tell me that it’s okay, it’ll grow back. I want her to laugh and say she never liked my fringe anyway. But she isn’t here. There’s no one here but me. I want to go home.
A lump rises in my throat. I try to bite back the tears, but this time a few escape, and that makes more come because, out of everything I’ve endured, it is losing my hair that has finally broken me. Am I the stuck-up princess Feather says I am? I never asked my dad enough about his work. Maybe if I had, I wouldn’t be here now, waiting and hoping for a rescue party that is never going to come.
There’s a knock on the door.
“Go away!” I shout.
“Robyn, please, let me in.”
There’s a calmness i
n Talon’s voice that something inside me yearns for, and before I’ve even registered what I’m doing, I’ve opened the door. Talon stands on the threshold, his eyes dark with pity. And that makes me mad, because I don’t want him to feel sorry for me. I want him to let me go. RIGHT NOW.
I scream at him, but even as I do, I know that it’s not about him. I’m screaming at this stupid bathroom, at my own vanity for caring about my stupid, stupid, stupid hair and most of all at my dad, because I need him now and he’s not here. Why hasn’t he come for me? Why has he left me here like this, alone? The scream is loud and angry and filled with all the pain I will ever feel in my entire life, because nothing can ever be as bad as this. And just for a little while I want someone else to pick up the pieces of who I used to be and to put them together again, because I can’t remember how.
Talon flinches, but he lets me yell right in his face. I shout until there’s nothing left inside me, only a calmness as still and empty as my prison cell. Then I drop back, falling against the sink, like all my energy has left with my yelling. Only then does Talon come forward into the bathroom. He moves very slowly, as though around a caged tiger, to sit on the bathtub. I stay resting against the sink, its edges making grooves in the palms of my hands. Neither of us speaks. Neither of us moves for a long time.
Finally Talon says, “Robins are very resilient birds, you know, and incredibly territorial. They will do anything to protect their families. They’ve even been known to fight with much bigger birds, if necessary.”
“And who usually wins?” I wipe my cheek with the back of my hand, but most of my tears have already dried up. “Actually, don’t answer that.”
“Feather will let you go, when your father gives her what she wants.”
“And if he doesn’t?”
Talon says nothing, because there’s nothing to say.
My legs hurt from standing and the floor is grubby, so I drop down next to him on the edge of the bath. It’s a tiny space, and our arms almost touch. I remember how warm his hand felt on my skin in the living room, and I let my arm fall against his. He looks up. There’s an intensity in his eyes, like he just wants me to understand that he’s actually a good person. It scares me suddenly how much I want to believe that. I look away, up at the tiny grating. “What’s it like out there today? The weather, I mean.”
“Gray. Miserable.”
Tears rise up again, so I shut my eyes and imagine a charcoal sky, fading to tarnished silver on the horizon. It is magnificent. It is the same sky that hangs over Addy and my mum and my dad. I want to be standing under that sky. I want to feel the lick of wind on my face. I want the rain to kiss my cheeks. And I want to see all the birds I don’t have names for. I miss my family.
I don’t realize I’ve said it out loud, until Talon says, “Me too.”
“Your brother’s dead?”
“Yes, and my dad.”
The silence between us stretches from here to Canada.
“I’m sorry.”
“Why?”
“I don’t know. It’s just what people say.”
• • •
“Why did you go into politics?” I ask Dad. We are walking back toward the hotel along the Seine. Dad’s meeting with the French president isn’t until Thursday, and that means we still have a whole day, just the two of us. Well, five of us, if you include Gordon, Harold, and Mary (Dad’s secretary), none of whom are ever far away. For the moment, though, it is just Dad and me and the river. Gordon is hanging back, talking on his mobile. It’s late afternoon, and the winter sunlight is thin. It will be dark soon, and the shadows of the buildings hang long over the cobbled banks.
“I wanted to do good,” Dad says.
I blow a raspberry. “Cliché alert. Try again.”
“I wanted to protect people. Build a better world for our children.”
I blow two raspberries. “Are you trying to make me throw up? Come on, old man. Tell the truth for once in your life. You’re a politician, so I know that’s hard for you, but come on!”
“The truth; there is no truth.”
“Is this one of those ‘There is no tree’ things?”
Dad isn’t listening to my bad existentialism, though. He is staring across the river. ‘Truth is a fabrication. There is never only one truth. Only versions of it.” Dad nods at the bridge ahead of us. “Le Pont de l’Archevêché. The lovers’ bridge. Couples attach engraved padlocks to the railings and then throw the keys into the river.”
“Do you and Mum have one?”
“Yes.”
“You should have made it a combination lock.”
Dad looks at me sadly. “Robyn, you know your mother and I—”
But I walk on ahead of him. “Can we go and see the padlocks?” I don’t want another “Your mother and I love you and Adriana very much” or “All marriages have their difficulties” conversation. I have heard it before too many times.
As we approach the base of the bridge, Dad says suddenly, “I meant what I said about going into politics to help people. To make a difference. To do good.”
“And have you?” The daylight is almost gone now. My dad is standing a step in front of me—a dark silhouette against a fading sky. Behind him, the thousands of padlocks chained to the bridge wink in the last glow of the sun. “Dad?”
“Yes . . . yes. On balance, I believe I have done more good than bad.”
I laugh then and slide my arm through his. “You could never do anything bad.”
“I hope you always believe that, Bobs.”
“I will,” I say, just as all the streetlights in Paris flick on and the river is filled with streamers of green and blue and gold.
• • •
“Enjoying the book?” Talon asks the next afternoon, while returning me to my cell after a trip to the bathroom. There are now six scratches on the wall under my bed.
“The photos are nice.” It’s only been a day since I screamed at him, but already there’s been a shift between us. I’ve begun looking up expectantly whenever the key has turned in the lock. I’m noticing little things about him too, like how there is a tiny fleck of brown in his right iris, or how his walk is ever so slightly lopsided, or how I can tell he’s smiling by the creases at the corners of his eyes.
He was surprisingly calm about the torn page in his book. I told him this morning when he brought my breakfast. “Accidents happen,” was all he said. Now I point at a photo of a dark-brown bird that I’ve wanted to show him for a while. “This one is great. It reminds me of one I saw at the wildlife photography exhibition last year. It’s not the same bird. The one I saw was green, bright green, with an orange beak and a tufty darker green patch on top, like a cowlick.”
“Was it a parrot?” he asks.
“No. I don’t know what it was, and I know what a parrot looks like. Anyway, it’s not about what type of bird it was. Just that it was looking at you, head cocked, like it was assessing you. In this photo, the bird—”
“A crossbill.”
“—is doing the same thing. How come you know so much about this stuff?”
He sits down next to me on the bed. “Just picked it up over the years. My dad was into bird-watching. He wanted me and my brother to get into it too. I thought it was lame at first.”
“But you changed your mind?”
He shrugs. “Jez got really sick, and suddenly doing things as a family meant more. We’d always go out bird-watching on the days when Jez was well enough.”
“Was it fun?”
“No, it’s as boring as you’d expect. It’s cold, and nothing happens for hours. Sometimes you can go the whole time without seeing anything, but when you do, it’s amazing. And you get kind of addicted to that rush. I saw a white-tailed eagle once.” He catches my blank look. “They are seriously rare. Even went extinct for a while and had to be reintroduced
into the wild. They have these huge wings with what look like fingers on the ends. They are stunning. Seeing something like that makes all the waiting about in the cold worth it.”
“Photography’s like that,” I say. “Waiting ages in the freezing cold for one photo. And if you’re me, it isn’t even that good. Not like these.” I turn the pages of the book, stopping at a picture of a ball of beige downy feathers and two enormous dark eyes. “Oh, he is cute.”
“That’s Bert.”
“You named the pictures in your book?”
“I didn’t. My brother, Jez, did.”
It’s the kind of thing Addy would do, only she’d want to call him Princess something or other. She’d slap her hand on the page and say, “Stroke owl, Byn. Stroke, stroke.”
“You must miss him,” I say.
“Yeah. He didn’t deserve what happened to him. None of us did.” Talon sounds angry.
I shouldn’t care about Talon’s brother, but I do. Last night I even found myself thinking about what Talon’s face is like. His eyes are special. Is it weird to wonder if the rest of him is?
I ask him what the weather is like outside. It’s beginning to feel like a thing between us, and for some reason that matters to me.
Talon’s answer is gruff this time. “Dunno. Sunny, maybe. I haven’t been outside.”
He leaves shortly after. Last night after dinner and then again this morning, he apologized for locking me in, but today he goes silently. It feels as though I’ve done something wrong.
• • •
It is late evening on the seventh day. How can I have only been here for a week? It seems like a lifetime. We read a book at school by a guy who had been held hostage for fourteen years. He kept himself sane and fit by sticking to a routine. A set number of laps of his cell each day. A set number of push-ups. When he became weaker, or was tied up, he would do smaller exercises and imagine doing the larger ones. I can’t think about being locked up here for fourteen years. No amount of exercising would keep me sane. I get up off the bed and begin to walk around the room. It can’t hurt to keep fit. After four laps, I cross the room in three big strides and then take five normal paces back. The next time across, I make nine really tiny steps.
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