Girl A: an astonishing new crime thriller debut novel from the biggest literary fiction voice of 2021

by Abigail Dean

  ‘Hello,’ I said, and he blinked.

  ‘Alexandra. I didn’t recognize you.’

  ‘It’s good to see you,’ I said, and meant it.

  He held out a hand, and I shook it.

  ‘I know that you don’t have to be here,’ I said. ‘I appreciate it.’

  ‘You don’t want to face those cronies on your own.’

  ‘I think that I could handle them.’

  ‘Oh, I think that you could handle anyone.’

  The truth was that Bill had done it all. He had recommended a probate lawyer to review the documents signed by my siblings. He had appointed a surveyor, and read their report. He had investigated the council’s budget and assessed its current offerings. He had lunched with the councillors themselves, who were old fashioned, sure, but easily charmed. He had procured our Friday-morning appointment, when everybody – he was sure of it – would be in a good mood.

  ‘Are you ready?’ Bill asked.

  ‘I’ve got notes. And the plans.’

  The plans were my only contribution. Christopher worked as an architect at a great glass studio in North London, and had agreed to spend an afternoon in Hollowfield, composing a first set of drawings at a discounted rate.

  ‘Could I make a weekend of it?’ he asked, when he was booking a train.

  ‘I wouldn’t.’

  He had hand-delivered a neat wooden tube to the Romilly. When he passed it over, his hands were quivering. He crossed to the window and waited there, watching the street below, while I unravelled the paper across the duvet. There were layers of it, so that the community centre appeared at first from the outside, encased in metal and wood. Beneath that, the external walls were removed and the interior exposed. Figures walked between the rooms and met at tables, in corridors, at the kitchen sink. On the last sheet, the building was a shell, to reveal the garden behind it. I traced the fine pencil lines with a finger, trying to consolidate this with the house I remembered. Even the form of it was incompatible with Moor Woods Road, where each sheet of paper had been dog-eared, and drawn on before.

  ‘There’s something uniquely embarrassing,’ Christopher said, ‘about creating something for a friend—’

  ‘It’s perfect,’ I said, and started to laugh. ‘Is it expensive?’

  ‘Well. It could be—’

  Inside the office, the receptionist stirred, like somebody waking up.

  ‘They’re waiting for you,’ she said.

  Together, we took the drab corridor. There seemed to be a grandeur to these buildings in London, cared for quietly through the nights, but here there were vacant bulbs and piles of tatty flyers. Events long passed, and poorly attended. The carpet was matted with dirt and gum, and curling away from the walls, as if it had decided that the time had come to leave.

  The councillors received us in their chamber, which was just a small, hot room, with heavy curtains and a table too big for its inhabitants. I had prepared myself to recognize them – to be recognized – but they were all old and unfamiliar. I thought of Devlin, always the first into the meeting room, her hand outstretched, her mouth on the brink of a smile. Devlin would devour them whole.

  ‘This is Alexandra,’ Bill said.

  ‘Hello,’ I said, and shook five hands. There were a dozen spare chairs at the table, but I stayed standing. Let them see me, I thought. Give them a tale to tell at tonight’s dinner table. Let them look.

  I had expected them to be stern and suspicious, but now that I was here, they seemed mostly sad.

  ‘You may know me better,’ I said, ‘as Girl A.’

  Let me tell you about the community centre.

  The building would be constructed from wood and steel, and it would rise from the side of the moor. There would be a long wooden ramp from Moor Woods Road to the glass front. Already you can see the welcome area, with communal tables and a row of computers. For the first year, it smells of lumber. There will be coding classes, hosted by a local IT consultant; she once owned a computer shop in town. An open corridor extends to the back of the building, and on either side of the corridor is a door, each facing the other. Behind one of the doors is a children’s library, with bean bags and bookshelves, and stencils of two children on the wall, guiding your way. Behind the other door is a hall, with a small stage and couches to rest from the dancing. On certain afternoons, adults gather in a circle here, talking when they wish. If you pass them both, you will find that the corridor expands into a further room, cut with skylights. Our kitchen was once here, and there is still a counter and a sink and a fridge, for events. The fridge is usually full. You slide back the glass doors at the end of the building, and step onto a veranda. On summer evenings, once the clouds have burnt, you can sit on this terrace and watch the hills eclipse the sun. There will be small events: a choir recital, or a beer festival. There will be music.

  I understood the curse that we had cast on the town. Once the mills had spun cotton and money. Canal boats jostled for a mooring. Loud men came from cities you hadn’t seen, to survey their investments. Now your town is known for something individual, rather than communal. For something cruel and small. I know how that feels. You can demolish the house, or request us to sell it. But you can’t erase the past, or make it right, or misremember it as something better than it was. Take it, and use it. It’s still possible for you, like us, to salvage something good.

  ‘It’s ambitious,’ I said. ‘I acknowledge that.’

  The councillor in the middle of the row gestured for me to sit down. I understood that the others were watching her. Waiting for her to speak.

  ‘There are worse things than ambition,’ she said. ‘That’s for sure.’

  I sat opposite her, and from my folder I took Christopher’s drawings and the accounting sheets, and the planning application which I had worked through with one of my colleagues, late into the night.

  ‘Do you have a name?’ the councillor asked. ‘A name for the place?’

  I hadn’t; and then, once she asked, I had.

  ‘The Lifehouse,’ I said.

  There were more and more days when we weren’t allowed from our rooms, and so there were events – a noise, late in the evening, or a missed meal – which I have never understood. The lost stories of the house. Performed still in a bedroom in Oxford, in the hospital room in the Chilterns and in rented apartments across Europe, during those multitudinous hours when nobody else in the world seems awake.

  For example: one morning, Mother left the house with Daniel, his cries fading down Moor Woods Road. They returned in the middle of the next night, with footsteps on the stairs and the touch of my parents’ bedroom door. For a handful of days after that, Daniel was quieter, and Mother didn’t look at Father, not even when he gathered her body against his, and kissed her face.

  Or: Noah’s birth, which happened in my parents’ room, without ceremony, so that one day Daniel’s cries divided, and he was demoted from the cradle to the sofa, or to the kitchen table, or to the floor.

  Or: Ethan’s conversations with Father. Father deigned to allow Ethan his freedom more often than the rest of us, and sometimes I heard them in the garden, talking together; mostly Father talking and Ethan assenting, laughing, the same laugh which he had refined at the dinner table with Jolly, when we still went to school. I prised a few snippets of conversation through the bedroom window, all of them useless:

  ‘—but you must have thought about it—’

  ‘—our own kingdom—’

  ‘—the eldest—’

  I spent each of these days willing Ethan to come into our room. He would know if things had gone too far, I thought. He would know exactly what to do. There was one afternoon – it was the time when Father would have been resting – when I heard his footsteps on the stairs. He walked past the room where Delilah and Gabriel were bound; past Mother and Father’s doorway; past his bedroom. The footsteps paused. Evie was asleep, a muddle of limbs beneath the sheet. ‘Ethan,’ I said. My voice was timid; it didn’t e
ven reach the door. ‘Ethan,’ I said, louder, and one of the floorboards shifted in reply. His footsteps retreated.

  Then the day of the chains.

  It started with Father’s form through the morning light, releasing the bindings. The troughs of muscle shifting beneath his shirt. Bread for breakfast, and the usual slew of lessons. It was always the Old Testament, now. (‘There are times,’ Father said, ‘when I think that Christ was a moderate.’) In my memories of this day, Gabriel and Delilah sit together at the kitchen table, their heads touching. It’s difficult to make out whose hair is whose.

  I was thinking about the possibility of lunch as a percentage, based on the data of the last ten days. That was as far back as I could remember, and it made the calculations easy. Starvation was such a boring affliction: the thought of food coated the words of the Bible, until I could no longer read them; it spilt into my games with Evie, so that midway down Route 1 I would suggest a stop for hamburgers and become lost in the thought of mince, onions, bun, swallowing down my saliva, no longer able to speak or imagine. I dreamt of feasts. When Mother served us, I divided my portion into small, delicate mouthfuls, and moved them to each corner of my tongue before I would swallow.

  ‘Alexandra?’ Father said.

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘Back to your rooms. Contemplation.’

  Not today, then. I adjusted my calculations.

  In our room, we sat in my bed, Evie’s spine against my ribs. She took the myths from beneath the mattress. I read and she turned the pages, as if we were at a piano. Midway through the siege of Troy, I reached the end of a paragraph and the page didn’t turn. I shifted the book from her hands, gently, so that she wouldn’t wake up, and turned to the illustration of Thyestes’ feast. The smell of baking rose from the kitchen. Maybe just from the pages. I wasn’t interested in Thyestes’ feud with his brother, or how he came to eat his own sons. I just wanted to look at the pictures of the banquet.

  Leaves scuttled across the window. Evening arrived, darkening the corners of the room. I thought that it was September, or maybe October. We should be summoned soon, for dinner or for prayer. I crossed the Territory and eased open the bedroom door. Across the gloom, the hallway was empty. All of the doors were closed.

  I returned to my bed.

  At some point I was asleep, because the noise woke me. A man crying out, once. I came to midway through it, so that I couldn’t understand what he had said. At the end of the hallway, where Gabriel and Delilah slept, there were a few frantic thuds, the house reverberating with them. Then a softer sound, the noise of a more malleable thing.

  Evie stirred, and I pulled the covers over our heads.

  There was a new noise, now, something human and wet. A kind of gurgling. Over it, the tone of Father’s voice, continuous, calm, as if he was coaxing a small child into something which it didn’t want to do.

  ‘What’s happening?’ Evie said, and I started; I had hoped that she was still asleep.

  ‘Nothing,’ I said.

  ‘But what time is it? Night-time?’

  ‘It doesn’t matter. Go back to sleep.’

  I lifted the corner of the duvet, and listened.

  That night, Mother didn’t visit us, and Father didn’t fasten our bindings. Still he spoke, late into the night, in that same low, slow tone. I lay with my hands over Evie’s ears. The room became cold, and in time the gurgling stopped.

  I talked about that night only once, with Ethan. He visited me at university, and we met at a tea shop in the centre of the town. I hadn’t wanted him to see my room, with decorations from the Jamesons and photographs of my friends. He would find something to ridicule. It was March, on the cusp of rain. Tourists were fumbling for anoraks. I saw him before he saw me, walking easily across the cobbles with a newspaper in his hand, amused by something on the back page.

  ‘Is it always this dreary?’ he said, when I was close enough to hear him, and I was glad that we embraced, so that I didn’t have to think of a clever answer.

  We sat in the window, facing out to the street. In that first hour, we were at our best. We talked about my degree and the odd cast of college. We talked about the students in his class, and how so many of them reminded him of one of us. We talked about my visits to London to see Dr K. The grandeur of her office there. ‘She did well out of you,’ Ethan said, and I shrugged.

  ‘Do you tell people where you’re going?’ he asked. He laughed, anticipating his own absurdity. ‘Who you are,’ he said, cinematic-dramatic.

  ‘Not yet,’ I said. ‘But I think that I will.’

  He raised an eyebrow. ‘That’s unexpected,’ he said. ‘From you.’

  ‘Well, I have friends here.’

  ‘Oh, I don’t blame you. It’s an excellent story. You get to be the one who escaped, after all.’

  ‘I wonder about that, though.’

  I was warm and content. It was good to sit here like this, with him, talking as friends. As friends, I wanted to confide in him.

  ‘There was a time,’ I said, ‘in the last year. In the last few months. I don’t remember. Somebody else tried to escape, I think. Gabriel. Maybe even Delilah. I heard this scuffle, on the stairs. Somebody stopped them. After that, there was this terrible noise, like someone being – I don’t know – like one of them was injured.’

  He had ordered a second scone, and he took a bite.

  ‘Do you remember?’ I asked.

  His mouth was full. He shook his head.

  ‘The next day,’ I said. ‘Father brought home the chains.’

  He swallowed. ‘That,’ he said, ‘I remember.’

  I turned away and watched the rain coming down, sliding across the window and jumbling the view, resting on the pavement and between the cobbles. ‘That night,’ I said. ‘I thought that I heard you. I thought that you might have been the one to stop them.’

  ‘I don’t remember this at all, Lex. There were all sorts of kerfuffles in that house. It could have been anything.’

  ‘But it’s strange, isn’t it?’ I said. ‘That after those noises – literally, the next day – Father changed his approach?’

  ‘Lex,’ he said. In the time that I’d looked away, his face had altered. ‘Now that you’re here – now that you’re a little older – isn’t it time to stop making things up?’

  The chains were three millimetres thick; one point five metres long; a bright, zinc-plated finish. They were sold as suitable for fixing hanging baskets, or chaining dogs. At Mother’s trial, the prosecution referred to this fact on several occasions. An easy headline.

  I spent many days contemplating the practicalities of this purchase. Father, in the aisle of a hardware shop – B&Q, perhaps – selecting the right tools for the job. Did he have a shopping trolley, or a basket? Did he make small talk with the teenager at the checkout? Did he ask for a carrier bag?

  The handcuffs were purchased separately, online.

  The chains were absolute. There were no evening congregations in the Territory, or readings of the Greek myths in the night. There was no Mystery Soup. There was no option to wriggle free and use the toilet, or the pot in our room. The first time I wet myself, I called for Mother for two or three hours, as the distraction became pain, then agony. The promise of relief, just behind it. Noah had whined through the day. I hadn’t heard Father’s footsteps since the early morning. ‘Where are they?’ I said, to Evie. My stomach was hot, distended; I didn’t want to move. I squeezed my knees to my belly.

  ‘It’ll be OK, Lex. Hold on.’

  I was starting to cry; I couldn’t seem to help that, either.

  ‘It won’t be, though.’

  The sensation of it came back to me in a taxi in Jakarta, with Devlin, on the way to the airport. One of our first business trips together. It was raining, the roads bulging with water and traffic. A closed rank of cars on each side. We were static for over an hour. ‘How long?’ Devlin asked, and the driver laughed.

  Devlin looked at her watch. ‘We’re going
to miss this flight,’ she said.

  ‘No – there must be something—’

  ‘Lex,’ she said, and threw up one arm, presenting four walls of vehicles. ‘Come on.’

  ‘Can we call the airline?’

  ‘They don’t hold planes,’ Devlin said. ‘Even for me.’

  It was the helplessness of it: back to the bedroom at Moor Woods Road and the warmth of urine spreading beneath me. I thought of our plane, reversing from its stand.

  ‘We can pay,’ I said, to the driver. I gathered my bag from the seat and combed for my wallet. He laughed again, harder this time.

  ‘Keep your money,’ he said. ‘It’s no good here.’

  ‘Lex,’ Evie said.

  Some time in the night. I had been asleep, oblivious, and for a moment I couldn’t speak. I was too angry with her.

  ‘Lex?’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Daniel doesn’t cry any more.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Not for three days.’

  ‘How do you know?’

  ‘Didn’t you notice? The quiet. It’s new.’

  ‘He’s getting older.’

  ‘But isn’t it weird?’

  ‘He’s just growing up.’

  ‘He’s still tiny, though.’

  ‘What are you trying to say?’

  ‘I don’t know.’

  ‘Then go back to sleep.’

  ‘It’s strange, though. Isn’t it?’

  ‘It’s OK, Evie.’

  ‘Promise?’

  ‘Promise.’

  The silence lasted so long that I thought she was asleep. Then, after half an hour – longer:

  ‘But why isn’t he crying?’

  I closed my eyes. I summoned Daniel, small and warm in my parents’ bed. Growing older, beginning to sleep through the night.

  Evie’s eyes, possum-wide in the darkness.

  ‘I don’t know,’ I said. ‘I don’t know.’

  After the council, the house. We bought coffee and tiffin, and walked in quiet to the car. Sun seeped through the clouds, and the moors glinted bronze where it hit them. Bill had parked outside the pub, and I looked up to the window of my room, hoping for some sign of Evie. The window was closed, and nobody was in it.