You don’t know anything about me, she thinks. But the Slaughter Man does.
“I tell you what. I bet I can tell a lot about you just by looking. Sit down here while you get your breath back.”
She sits gingerly beside him on the long trunk of a fallen sapling. It sags and springs beneath their weight, then settles.
“Okay. Now I’ll guess three things about you and if I guess them all right then you lose and you have to…”
The last time he made an offer like this, he wanted her to flash her tits. Is that what he’s angling for now? If he likes her, why can’t he say that? Why does he have to make it into a battle, her body a prize to be awarded to the victor, as if she has no needs or desires of her own? Perhaps she should lift her t-shirt for him right now. No, of course she shouldn’t.
“Actually, you know what? I’ll do it for free. Because I’m just that good. Right, first thing. You’re seventeen, right? Yeah, I know you are, that’s not one of the things, Katherine told me. So, I bet you’re doing A-levels.” She nods. “Course you are. I’m resitting my GCSEs. Well, I’m supposed to be. For all the fucking good it’ll do me. Right, sorry, I’m on about myself and we’re meant to be talking about you, better go back to paying you some attention. Typical girl, you are. I’m kidding. I’m kidding!”
He’s like a rabbit running from a fox, constantly switching direction so she can never quite pin him down to a single opinion. She keeps her face carefully neutral and waits for his next pronouncement.
“I bet you live… in a detached house… with at least one spare bedroom. Yes? Yeah, course you do. Holy shit, I’m out in the woods with a posh girl. Well, I live in a high-rise tower block. Drug dealers next door, working girls above us and everyone pisses in the lifts cos they don’t work so they might as well be used for something. Your face! Can’t you tell I’m kidding?”
Half the stuff you tell me turns out to be lies! How the hell am I supposed to know what’s true and what isn’t?
“We’re in a terrace. It’s a nice one. Old. Fancy fireplaces. Lots of trees in the street. Two bedrooms cos there’s only the two of us. Well, three of us with the knobhead. I can’t believe you thought I lived in a flat next to a drug dealer! That is actually quite offensive, that is. No, I don’t mean it, of course I don’t! Come on, Willow, stop taking everything so seriously. Right. Next thing.”
I bet, Willow thinks, I bet you got picked on at school. I bet they used to laugh at you when you got stuff wrong in class, and took your bag on the bus and threw it around, and you always got chosen last in PE, and that’s why you act so tough all the time. How am I doing, Luca? How do you like it when I do it to you?
“I bet your mum and dad are still together. Am I right?” He looks at her face, and laughs. “Yes! Three for three. I am the fucking king.”
I bet your dad’s a complete dick, Willow thinks sourly. I bet that’s where you get it from.
“Must be nice, having your dad around.” Luca’s trying to sound casual. “My mum left my dad when I was about six months old. Apparently he was a complete twat. I mean, if the ones she’s been out with him since are anything to go by…”
He’s holding her hand now, their fingers laced together, raised up between them as if they’re making a vow. She can feel the tension of the moment caught between their palms.
“Look, if I tell you this, you can’t tell anyone, right? I mean, I know you won’t tell anyone tell anyone, but, I mean, you can still write stuff down and that, can’t you? So you’ve got to promise not to say anything about it. Like, ever. Especially in writing. Cos, you know, there’s a court case coming up and that. I’ve got to be careful what I say, in case the other side find out about it and I get into worse trouble.”
She nods. When he lets her hand go, she can feel sweat drying against her skin.
“Okay. So what happened was…” He’s let go of her hand and is seeking out things to shred, picking off pieces of bark from the tree they’re sitting on, tearing handfuls of ivy leaves and ripping them into pieces. “A couple of years ago, my mum met this bloke.” He grimaces. “I mean, I love my mum. But she’s an absolute wanker when it comes to blokes.”
Willow is filled with a sudden longing for her dad.
“So this one was, like, such a tosser. He used to talk badly to her – to me as well, but I wasn’t bothered for me – throwing his weight about. Not cleaning up after himself, expecting his dinner made, stuff like that, you know? Arsehole behaviour.”
Why did she let him do that? Willow thinks incredulously. But then, how do you make a man do something if he really doesn’t want to?
“Then,” Luca says, and stops. Willow nods, not quite meeting his eyes in case she frightens him into silence. “One day. She was out. She’d gone shopping I think, with a mate or something. Like a proper day of it, going to a big shopping centre.” He laughs. “I mean, that’s a shit day out if you ask me, but anyway. And she was supposed to come back at a certain time and she was late. It wasn’t her fault, she missed the bus and got the next one… but he just, fucking, he just lost the plot.”
His fingers fidget about the log for something else to destroy. If she took his hand in hers, would he grow quiet? Or would he start tearing at her skin?
“So they had this massive row. Screaming, swearing, the full thing. I thought the neighbours might call the police. I mean, I nearly did it myself but I didn’t know if my mum… anyway. He was winding himself up to hit her. Squaring up to her and everything.”
He’s watching for her reaction. She isn’t sure what he’s expecting. The story he’s telling her is both banal and horrible, dreadfully familiar and dreadfully predictable, like a story from a soap opera. What’s the right expression for her to wear?
“And then…” he laughs. “Well to be honest, I don’t really know what happened next. I mean, you know when people talk about the red mist coming down? It was like, I was someone else for that bit of time. I can’t hardly even remember what I did to him, but I know it was bad because they made me look at the pictures afterwards and he was all bashed up and that…” There is a quiver of emotion in his voice that could be either fear, or remembered pleasure. “And I knew I’d done it, but I couldn’t remember doing it. So I called the ambulance, and everything kind of snowballed from there. I mean, I thought for a minute I’d killed him.”
He looks both ashamed and proud as he says this, and she finds herself staring at the skinny clench of his boyish fist in fascination. Surely he was acting in defence of someone else, so why is he the one who’s been sent away? Why didn’t the boyfriend have to leave? And how can a grown man be frightened of a boy?
“Thing is,” Luca continues, as if he can read her thoughts, “he fractured his skull. Well, okay, I fractured his skull. And that counts as, like, GBH. If they find that I did it – I mean, obviously I did it, but if they say it wasn’t, like, self defence – then I’ll end up doing time. Which is going to be crap, but, you know, I’ll manage.” He shrugs. “Only I can’t stay with my mum while we’re waiting for the court case cos she’s still with him, and he reckons he don’t feel safe with me around. And if I get sent down…” His face contracts and she glimpses the frightened teenager who lives behind the tough-guy persona. “At least it’ll be a chance to get some qualifications under my belt. I can do the classes and that. Keep myself busy. Not like there’ll be much else to do. Might as well try and better myself while I’m in there.”
Lucas adjusts his beanie hat and forces a cocky grin.
“Right, come on then. Best get back to you before you get mad about me not paying you any attention.”
I bet, she thinks, you have nightmares about being locked inside. About what might happen to you while you’re in there. I bet you’re terrified you won’t be able to cope.
“I bet,” he says slowly, eyes bright, gaze sly, “the lads at your college were well into you and your sister. You know. With you being identical twins and that. I bet they all used to fantasise ab
out—”
Before she can stop herself, she slaps him. The crack of skin against skin echoes off the trees like a gunshot. She regrets it almost immediately.
I’m sorry, she thinks frantically, and then, No I’m not sorry, how dare you? It’s because she has no words, that’s what it is. If she can’t speak, how else can she express what’s going on in her head? She reaches out to touch his cheek, but then Luca grabs her, his fingers hard and vicious in the meat of her shoulder, dragging and pushing her against a tree, and then his breath is in her mouth and his tongue is between her lips and his body is hard against hers, and this is not a kiss, it’s an invasion, an act of war, and all she can do is let it happen.
“Shit! Sorry. No.” As suddenly as it began, it’s over. Luca lets her go and backs away, rubbing his mouth with the back of his hand. “Jesus, no. Fuck. Are you all right? Sorry, of course you’re not, I mean, you shouldn’t have hit me either, but I shouldn’t have done that. Did I hurt you? God, I don’t ever want to, I promise, I swear, I won’t do that again.”
She feels sore and battered, but she’s not sure exactly which part of her he’s damaged. When she probes her lips with her tongue, her mouth feels swollen.
“I’m sorry. I am so sorry. But you can’t just, like, touch me like that, when I’m not expecting it.”
I didn’t touch you, she thinks. I hit you.
“I mean, I really like you.” His hand hovers over her shoulder. “But you’ve got to be careful around me, okay? We have to be – we can’t – I mean, if we’re ever, like, doing something and I push you away, you’ve got to let me do it and get right away from me cos otherwise I might—” His fingertips touch her face, light and delicate. “Are you scared of me now? Cos I wouldn’t blame you.”
The shameful thing is that she isn’t, she isn’t scared at all. While he was kissing her, she knew she was still alive.
“Here.” He picks up the knife, presses it into her hand. “Maybe you ought to hang onto this after all. Might come in handy some time.”
The handle feels good in her hand. She wants it and she doesn’t want it. It doesn’t feel like something she should keep hold of. With a sharp sense of loss, she lets it fall to the ground and kicks it away.
“Soft wench,” Luca says. “Think of the damage you could do with that. Look, we should get back, yeah? God, it’s hot, isn’t it? Are you hot?” He pushes his sleeves up to his elbows, then pulls them down again. “I’ve got to get back. You coming?”
It’s no good, she thinks as she follows behind him. I saw. He’s hoping she hasn’t noticed, but one quick glance was all it took to see that Luca’s forearms are crazed with long silvery scars, tracing out the places where the blue veins lie beneath his skin.
CHAPTER NINETEEN
“How are you, sweetie?”
Willow stretches out long and thin, enjoying the luxurious tug in her muscles, the feeling of expansion as her arms and legs breach the edges of the chair and her back presses against the arm. Then she coils herself back into the crease of the chair-arm and surrenders herself to her mother’s voice.
“I know you’ve been doing some work because your tutors email me when they’ve marked your assignments.” Her mum’s voice is uncertain, as if she isn’t sure it’s all right to say this. “It must be weird though, doing all that stuff by yourself rather than in a class.”
The weirdest thing about it is how little time it requires. Alone in her bedroom, she can blitz through what she’d previously have considered a full day’s work in a couple of hours. Of course, it’s possible that without the goad of a teacher supervising and critiquing her, she simply isn’t putting in enough effort, and her grades are falling through the floor.
“They send me the grades as well,” her mother continues. “But we haven’t been looking. I mean, we’ve seen them because they’re in the emails, but we don’t mind what marks you get. We’re just proud of you for getting something done.”
No, Willow thinks, don’t say that. She wonders if her mother can hear her frown through the phone handset.
“College rang,” her mother says. “To see how you were getting on.” She laughs. “I thought we’d burned our bridges there good and proper. Your dad was a bit rude, before. They send you their best.”
It’s hard to remember that the college still even exists, that each morning everyone but her still gets up and packs their bag, boards the bus and gets off again, pushes their way through the crush of students in the central hallways. Do her classmates talk about her at lunchtime sometimes? Or has everyone simply closed up around the gap where she used to be?
“They miss you,” her mother says. “That’s what Mrs Bascombe said, anyway.”
Yeah, right. There was no way her teachers missed her, not the girl she’d been these last few months, slow and silent and hopeless, physically present but mentally lost, a walking waste of carbon. Most of the time everyone forgot she was there. Then there’d be a moment when she’d become visible again, and with this remembering would come a sudden cold hush as everyone realised for the millionth time that they didn’t know what to say to her. Who could miss that?
“D’you know, when I was at university we were always talking about twins,” her mother says. “All the studies into nature versus nurture. And when we had our first scan and the sonographer told us, the first thing I thought was about all those papers.”
For a frantic moment, Willow wonders if her mother ever considered conducting her own experiment.
“It’s such a strange way to meet someone. A blurry black-and-white picture on a screen, and all these organs and the teeth and the massive heads…” her mother laughs. “And then there were two of you, my God, the shock of that. We couldn’t speak at first. And then your dad said, which kind is it? Are we having the weird kind? I mean, the kind like in The Shining?”
She can feel the laughter bubbling behind her breastbone, longing to be freed. She can imagine her dad saying exactly this.
“And the sonographer said, You mean girls? Like girls was the weird part, rather than identical…”
Willow’s ribcage is shuddering. She hopes her mother can hear the change in her breathing.
“Willow? Are you all right, sweetie? I haven’t made you cry, have I?”
No, that’s not it, I was laughing. Why can’t you tell? Except she’s crying too, although she only realises when something tickles her nose and that something turns out to be her own tears. The thick sharp line between laughter and sorrow has vanished. She settles for blowing her mother a kiss instead, hoping the burst of air in her mother’s ear will explain everything.
“It was funny though, knowing I’d only be pregnant once,” her mother says. “I mean, not that being pregnant is so much fun that I wanted to do it again. But we’d always wanted two children, and then we were getting two at the same time. I remember thinking all the way through, this is the only time I’ll ever do this. And I cried when they said I ought to have a c-section, because that meant I’d never get to go through labour. Can you imagine? That’s what it’s like though, the first time. You’re so obsessed with getting to the finish line you sort of forget that’s just the start.”
Willow isn’t comfortable with this conversation. She wants her mother to talk to her about things that don’t matter, about the weather and the garden and her dad and what they had for dinner that night and her work receptionist, Helen, who’s sometimes rude to the patients but whose rudeness is sometimes justified. She wants to get lost in stories about things she doesn’t care about and people she’ll never meet.
So tell her. Talk to her. Ask her a question so she’ll talk about something else.
Willow switches the phone to her other ear, and turns around in the chair to get more comfortable.
“The other thing I remember,” her mother says, her voice very hesitant now, “was thinking neither of you would ever be on your own. Joe told me once that before I was born, he always felt outnumbered. Because there were our mum an
d dad in the grown-up generation, and only him in his. He said he used to feel like being squashed. And when I saw the two of you on the screen I thought, Well, at least we’ll all be nice and even, right from the start.”
She’s never consciously thought of it this way before, but Willow recognises the rightness of what she’s saying. Even when she and Laurel were small, there was a balance in their family, their two-by-two configuration ensuring equality. She and Laurel squabbled, of course, fiercely and many times a day. But when it came to the big decisions, they spoke as one, taking advantage of their twinship to add weight to their arguments. We don’t want to go for a walk, we think we should go to the park instead. We’d like to have pasta, not potatoes. But we both like jumping in puddles. Sometimes they won, sometimes they lost; but they both knew that, working together, they won more often than they would have done if they were one on their own.
“There was this one time when you were about six,” her mother says. “You had a couple of friends round. You were all doing some drawing. And one of the other girls, she was being silly, the way kids are when they’re somewhere new, and she said Laurel’s drawing was rubbish. Poor Laurel was absolutely crushed. And you looked at the mean girl, and you looked at Laurel, and you said, Well, I think it’s beautiful. And you started pointing out all these nice things, the colours she’d chosen and so on, and after a minute the other little girl, the one who hadn’t been mean, started joining in as well, everyone saying how great Laurel’s drawing was. Only soon you were both praising Laurel’s drawing by saying it was better than the mean girl’s, and the mean girl started crying.”
Willow tries to remember these events – the colouring, the dining table, the girls from their class – but comes up empty. Did this really happen? How can her mother recall it so clearly when to Willow herself, it feels like a story about someone else?
“So your dad felt like he had to tell you off,” her mother continues. “Because, to be fair, the mean girl was a guest, and you had made her cry. But as soon as he started talking, Laurel glared at him and said, Don’t tell Willow off, she was looking after me. And he said afterwards he’d never realised until then how great it was to have a sibling. How much he’d missed out on, being an only child. He said he knew you’d be all right no matter what, because you’d always have each other’s backs.”
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