‘I don’t care,’ I told her. ‘I don’t want to see him. I wish he was bloody dead. I wish he was in hell.’
Chapter Seventy-Four
Choices
It takes a while until I realise what I’m seeing. I don’t mean Lucy. I mean what’s round her neck. I mean that the diamond and emerald necklace is more of an emerald necklace with diamonds. I mean that, against the shrivelled skin, in the cavity of her collarbone, there lies an emerald the size of a pigeon’s egg. The Callington Emerald.
The irony isn’t hard for me to see. I’ve found the lost fortune and there’s absolutely squat I can do about it. I’ve found the lost fortune and most likely lost my life in the process.
And there’s something else, which takes longer to come to me, and it’s this: I’ve been thinking it was Mary, all Mary. I’ve been thinking that Beatrice was just a foul-natured old harpy, but I’ve been underestimating her. Because the last time the emerald was seen, it was hanging round her neck. And there’s only one way it can have ended up round Lucy’s.
By the time the candle has burned down to two-thirds of its length, and I’ve cried myself hoarse and my fingernails are cracked and torn from where I have been scratching mindlessly at the tapestry-covered door, I understand that, however extreme the situation, you are always left, right up to the wire, with choices. It never gets any better. However powerless, beat up, imprisoned, humiliated, the choices never go away.
I could choose, right now, for instance, looking at Lucy, who obviously failed to extract herself from this black and stuffy tomb, to accept my fate, make my peace with God, prepare myself to die with all the dignity I can muster.
Well, fuck that for a game of soldiers. If I’m going to die, I’m going to die fighting. My baby is going to breathe real air if it kills me. Which, of course, it probably will. I may be the architect of my own misfortune, but that doesn’t mean I should carry on adding wings and cornices and blind staircases until the whole edifice collapses.
By the time I have emerged from my hysteria-induced funk, I am shaking with cold instead of emotion. The first threat to my survival is hypothermia. My growing lethargy, without a doubt, is related to my body temperature. I have two choices: freeze to death or plunder Lucy’s suitcase. And once I’ve done that, I have to find out everything I can about my prison before the light runs out.
So I plunder Lucy’s suitcase. She’s dead. What does she care?
But I still feel the irony of the distaste I feel for digging through the belongings of a dead person, considering that it’s the entire driving force behind those who have imprisoned us. The quantity and type of belongings it took for Mary and Beatrice to convince Edmund that his wife had deserted him are slightly pathetic, bear sad testimony to the simplicity of the man. They’re all party clothes. Party clothes and handbags, and just a couple of pairs of the type of shoes that fall apart if they encounter terrain rougher than shag-pile. The tawdriness of the late sixties writ large: geometric prints, empire waistlines, narrow velvet ribbons tied in bows below the bust-line. Thigh-skimming, long sleeved, bouffant-haired, pretend little-girl clothing; shiny plastic bags; square toed patent shoes, striped and Paisley tights of the sort that make your legs look like sofa arms. A jumble of jewellery – necklaces, earrings, rings – thrown in in a tangle, as though the thrower were enraged at the necessity of wasting something so valuable. Real gem stones: it must have pained Beatrice to throw away such a chunk of the family fortune for the sake of verisimilitude.
She must have been so pretty, this leggy brunette with the citified wardrobe. Pretty and petite. These clothes are sizes too small for me: not unflattering sizes-too-small, but impossible sizes too small. The delicate fabrics, already crumbling with age, rip apart as I try to stretch them over my shoulders, fall into tatters held together only by the stitching at the neck and seams. I can barely cram the ends of my feet into the toes of her shoes.
It’s hopeless. All I can achieve is a sort of silk festoon affect that, even layered as I try it, is precious little protection against the February cold. I wonder briefly if she had any normal clothes, but of course I know the truth: these clothes are the image of Lucy that Mary and Beatrice wanted rid of. What they wanted to expunge was that part that was the greatest threat, the greatest effrontery to the dowdy grandeur that sees respectability as paramount; the part, probably, that appealed to Edmund the most: her glamour. They wanted done with her, and these clothes are a metaphor for all they hated, as my credit cards and car keys and cellphone are for what they hate about me. And besides, if you want a man to hate his ex, there is nothing like suggesting, even subliminally, that she has taken off for a life of cocktails and love affairs. Much harder to expunge her memory if he thinks she’s nursing orphan kiddies in Calcutta.
There’s a bottle of Chanel still sealed up and a quarter full. It smells, like all old perfume, faintly of bitter almonds.
‘Oh God, Lucy,’ I say to her, ‘I’m sorry.’
She doesn’t answer. There’s a bottle of some Guerlain scent in my own bag. I noticed it when I was looking for the lighter.
‘Shit,’ I say suddenly. Because I’ve remembered the cellphone. Good grief, girl, how could you forget something as obvious as that?
I leap up, motley tatters drifting behind me, and snatch up my bag. Tip it out all over the floor, plastic and metal and glass gushing through the zipper. Sift through the pile, wishing to God I had picked something other than the high-fashion thumb-sized handset I did, because every second it takes to find it is another second I have to stay in this prison.
My pulse races again, that bitch hope playing havoc with my heart. Of course, of course, it’s so simple. I just have to call for help and someone will come, someone will find their way behind the wardrobe and save me. I can’t believe I didn’t think of it before …
It’s not there. Of course it isn’t.
I sit back, heavily, feel hope rush away. The walls seem suddenly closer, the light from the candle weaker. I will never get out. She couldn’t. What hubris has convinced me that I am stronger, brighter, more resourceful than Tilly’s mother was?
Stop it. Stop it. You have so little time …
I wipe my eyes with the back of my hand, cast about for some new shred of hope to cling to.
There’s precious little. The contents of my bag are useless: the pointless, flimsy, throwaway fripperies of life in the twenty-first century. Plastic that bends, objects designed to weigh nothing so that little old princess me doesn’t have to strain her shoulder carrying them around. There’s nothing resembling a tool in here, let alone a weapon. Nothing I could use to attract attention short of breaking up the furniture and setting fire to it, and I don’t fancy my chances of surviving the fumes long enough for that to do any good.
They’d find the bodies, at least.
I’ll save the last of the lighter. When I get to the point where the thirst is overtaking me, when I think I’m sinking into delirium, I’ll put it to the tapestries. It’s a faster way to die, and—
Stop it. Don’t think that way. Don’t you dare give up.
The only heavy object in here is the candlestick. An old-fashioned brass one made for coshing burglars. Maybe I could use it to attract attention. I know no-one uses this wing, that the chances of being heard are minimal, but if I keep it up for long enough, they’ve got to start a hunt for me at some point. I’ll just bang away and bang away and eventually someone will hear. Or maybe I could even break through the wall. It can’t be more than lath and plaster under there.
I try pulling one of the tapestries away, to see the wall behind. But it’s not nailed, or hanging from rods: it’s been glued in place, with some fixative that is strong enough to tear my remaining fingernails. I try the carpet, but it’s the same. I am, effectively, in a padded cell. Even the ceiling, five metres up, is lined with a heavy cloth hunting scene. No amount of shouting, or banging, is going to make any difference. It would be like thumping a feather bed.
He must be waking up around now, wherever he is. Waking up and thinking about coming to find me. What will he find? Will they have packed my stuff away, removed the lot, or left it scattered about the room, just a few prime objects gone, to show the hurry in which I left?
Hopelessly, I thump a couple of times on the wall anyway. Allow a couple of tears to fall. What do I do? What do I do now? I have to get out of the cold. The shivering is so exaggerated now, I can barely keep my hands still.
Choices again.
I could just let it take me. Hypothermia is a relatively kind death, or so I’ve read. It’s more of a slide into unconsciousness and coma than anything else. It’s got to be better than the cramps, the breathlessness, the slow agony of dying from thirst. But there’s my baby. It’s not just me. It’s the two of us, facing this end together. If I let them take me now, there will be no chance at all.
I eye my only option in the fading candlelight. I don’t have long now. I have to decide. The light will soon be gone, and if I’m going to do this, I would rather it were not in the dark.
I can’t do it. I can’t. I’d rather die …
I speak to myself out loud, try to drown out the voice inside.
‘That’s the choice, Melody. You’ve got to do it, or you will die.’
But look at her. Look at her. She’s dead. I can’t touch her. What if she … what if she …
There’s not a nerve in my body that doesn’t scream out against the unnatural nature of what I’m about to do. It’s grave-robbing. It goes against every taboo, every disease-avoiding, dignity-in-death instinct I have. But the choice I have is no choice at all.
I cross the silent carpet, stand over the bed. Gaze down with pity and revulsion at the sunken eye sockets, the protruding teeth. How long did it take her to die, all alone in here? How long will it take me to join her, wherever she is?
Lucy is draped in a heavy coverlet, like the one on my marital bed. It’s huge and thick, will wrap round me at least three times. And underneath, under the bedclothes, there is … oh, God, I mustn’t think. I mustn’t think about it.
I reach out and take the cover between my fingers.
She’s dead, OK? She doesn’t need it. You need it. She would understand. She would be doing the same thing herself.
‘Oh, God,’ I repeat. ‘Oh, God, Lucy, I’m sorry.’
And I lift it off. Grit my teeth as I feel it peel back, pull away from the form beneath. This is too much. It’s more than anyone should have to—
And it’s off. Soft and solid in my arms, my only route to salvation.
I don’t even look. Turn my back and walk round the bed to the other side. Wrap the drape – my winding sheet – round my body and lie, back to the corpse, on the empty side of the mattress. Pull up my knees, tuck my hands between my thighs and try to quell the nausea. Lie for a moment like this as, gradually, the shaking slows and the weight of exhaustion drifts over me.
And then I take the final choice of all. Reach out a hand and pick up the candle.
Blow it out.
Chapter Seventy-Five
Precious Life
There are miracles. Every day there are miracles.
In the dark, there is no time. I don’t sleep. But soon, I’m not awake either.
Instead I go to beautiful places inside my head. They say your life passes before your eyes when you die: mine passes in slow motion. I go home, and dive off the barrier reef. I clamber up mossy steps in Angkor Wat and watch the sun rise over a thousand gracious pinnacles. I hear the morning songs of Bali, taste the sharp dawn mist over the rice terraces, dig my fingers into the lustrous thickness of his hair and close my eyes.
The places I wanted to take him. Petra and Ephesus and Karnak and Uluru and Ubud. I wanted to feed him Moreton Bay bugs and mangosteen. I wanted us to lie together under a mosquito net, listening to the jungle symphony in the night.
Time slides past, unchanging, only the sound of my breath, the sound of my heart.
Our baby. I feel it inside me, feel it die with me. Our child. His nose, my mouth: the promise of our future; the chances that we had, the chance to get it right. No restrictions, no history, our character flaws wiped out, cancelled. I see us, stupid, stupid, all the things we will not know: the birthdays, the ponies, the skinned knees, bath-time, my husband sleeping, this cheated life clutched to his chest.
My tongue long since cleaved to the roof of my mouth, my lips, cracked, fallen open to let dry air in, ulcerate the membranes. A couple of times I dry-heave into the pillow, but it brings no relief. My head is filled with searing white light; a circular saw hacks at my skull, drills pierce my joints. My breath comes fast, periodically, heart pounding as though with panic, hands, feet freezing though they are covered by the blanket. This is dehydration kicking in. Perhaps I should have let myself succumb, as I wondered, to the cold.
Instead, I take us away, to Koh Chang, to the wet heat of tropical night, and we walk along the beach to the bar strip, lie on mats on the sand beneath a million stars, drink long, cold gin and tonics, glasses frosty with ice, spicy little Bali limes crushed into the coldness. We watch the fire juggler at the tide’s edge, teeth flashing in his flame-burnished face. And I look at Rufus and I am filled with peace. Love saves you, warms you. I will never leave you, darling. Wherever I am, I will always be with you.
I can no longer swallow. There’s not enough spit in my mouth. To die like this: preserving energy to the very last. Holding on in the darkness because the darkness beyond is worse.
Miracles happen every day. I know that now. You were my miracle, my salvation and I will never let you go. My heart. My beating heart.
And then there are sounds, muffled, and I realise that they are no longer in my head. There is someone on the other side of the door, and they are trying to get in.
Chapter Seventy-Six
The Polyester Angels
And then there are voices. Two of them, suddenly distinct, as the barrier is moved back.
Nessa: ‘Christ. Yes. There’s a door back here. Good boy! Good boy!’
And Roly. Sounding pleased as punch with the praise: ‘Well, quick. See if you can get it open.’
‘Good boy!’ she says again. ‘Who’s the clever, clever baby! Go and close the door, for God’s sake. We don’t want somebody finding us. Ooh, you clever, clever boy!’
And then the latch clicks and the door begins to swing open. Nessa calls back over her shoulder: ‘You were right. There’s a room back here. Strewth! We’d never have found it …’
I see dim light filtering through the doorway. My mouth doesn’t work. I don’t have enough saliva to swallow, let alone speak.
The light reduces dramatically. Roly must have come back. ‘Is she in there? Pwooagh.’ This latter sound is an expression of disgust.
‘Well, there’s something in there,’ says Nessa.
Torchlight plays over the walls. I try to croak out some word, some indication that I’m still alive, but all I hear is the thin whistle of air in my throat. I try to turn on to my back. It takes me three goes. I’m frightened by the deterioration in my strength in the time I’ve been drifting.
‘Something moved,’ says Nessa, urgently, ‘I’m sure it did. Come on. She’s in here. She’s got to be.’
And then there is a scrabbling, wriggling presence between them, and a body barrels across the floor. And I am lying there, dry-weeping as I feel Perkins’s filthy breath, his warm wet tongue slobbering deliciously over my face, my cracked lips. I extract an arm from my rank swaddlings, throw it around his neck and choke-sob into his warm silken ears.
Perkins puts his forepaws up on the bed, pants and covers me in mucus. Nothing, nothing has ever felt so good.
‘I think he’s found her,’ says Nessa.
‘Is she alive?’
‘I don’t know. Come on. Mel? Are you there? Are you OK? Can you answer me?’
The torchlight moves once again, hits the carpet, the far wall, the ceiling. She’s climbing thr
ough. I turn my head to see her.
‘She’s moving!’ She calls back over her shoulder. ‘I don’t think she can talk but she’s – Jesus.’
‘What?’ asks Roly.
The beam has landed on Lucy’s face. Stays there, wobbling, as Nessa drinks in what she sees. Then it flicks forward and she sees me, sees the whites of my eyes and says ‘Jesus’ again.
Roly clambers through the doorway. ‘What is it?’
She’s halfway to me. ‘She’s here. Look.’
And she’s down on her knees, pushing Perkins out of the way and covering my face with her tears. Sensible Nessa, bawling against my cheek. ‘It’s OK. We found you. You’re OK. Oh God—’
I put a finger against her miraculous face and run it along its length. It’s so warm, so soft.
‘Have you got the water?’
‘Yuh,’ he says. ‘She’s alive?’
‘Yes, of course she’s fu— yes. Yes, she is. She’s pretty crook, but she’s still with us.’
Roly appears over Nessa’s shoulder. Hands her a plastic bottle. ‘Hello, Mel,’ he says, as though he were at a pheasant shoot. ‘How are you?’
And I see his eyes widen as he sees past me in the dark. ‘Bloody hell!’ he barks.
Perkins bounces and wags, and Nessa twists the top off the bottle, slowly, slowly, like she’s running on frame-by-frame. Holds it to my lips. I grab at it as the water touches my tongue, try to snatch it from her, but she holds firm, prises my fingers away. ‘Slowly,’ she says. ‘You’ll throw it up. Just a little. It’s OK. You can have more. Oh God, Mel, I heard those bitches and I had a hard time making myself believe it, but … oh God, I’m so sorry. I should’ve looked earlier.’
‘Who the hell is that?’ asks Roly.
Nessa doesn’t reply, watches me and controls the trickle of life into my body. I look up into her eyes like a small child, feel the miracle. I want to gulp, to slather it over my parched skin, to tip the bottle back and let it pour, pour, pour, but she holds it steady, pulls it back to wait to see if I’ve coped.
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