Eva faced forward, quickened her step, and heard the other’s pace pick up too. Not enough to say I’m taking you seriously, but rather teasing, tormenting, warning I can catch you any time I fucking well please. She could make it to the station, but what if no one was around? It happened sometimes, admittedly not often, but still. On her right, a pub appeared, the same pub she’d walked past every day for ten years, the same pub Mr Burstock asked her to meet him in, the same pub she’d never set foot in before.
She pushed the door open and stepped into the Hart and Hounds. It was ill-lit and smelled like beer, but her shoes didn’t adhere to the wooden floor and the seat she chose was neither damp nor sticky. The woman behind the bar smiled, a bleach-blonde spider in a web of glass and metal and mirrors.
‘What can I get you, love?’
‘Gin and tonic, please,’ said Eva, though she’d never had one in her life. Her mother used to talk about Great-Aunt Agatha who went to clubs and drank such things and, inevitably according to Beth, did things with the men there that got her into trouble. Eva repeated, as if to make sure her mother, wherever she was, heard: ‘Gin and tonic.’
She paid and stared at the clear liquid, fascinated by the way the ice bobbed against the wedge of lime, shifted and shuffled by the tiny bubbles making their way to pop on the surface. The barmaid wandered off to attend to the two old chaps at the other end of the bar who looked like regular fixtures. Eva sensed as much as saw someone sit beside her. It took long moments to turn her head and meet those dark, dark eyes, take note of the sheen on those red, red lips.
The tips of a tattoo peeped from the neck of the woman’s tee-shirt and Eva wondered about the design even as her hand itched to pull at the fabric and see what lay beneath. She made a fist, then two, and laid one on either side of her glass.
‘Hello, hen,’ said the woman. ‘I’m Lucy.’
‘I saw you.’
‘I know you did, that’s why I followed you.’ She leaned in. ‘What’s your name?’
‘Eva.’ It was out before she could stop herself.
‘I’m hoping you might help me, Eva.’ Lucy said the name beautifully, in a grown-up way that rolled shivers through Eva; she didn’t shorten it or make it sound like a little girl’s silly nickname.
‘I can’t. It’s against the rules,’ Eva poured out in a high voice that attracted the attention of the barmaid, who called, ‘All right, love?’
Eva nodded quickly, not wanting to cause a scene. And she had to admit she wasn’t entirely sure whether her nerves came of fear or arousal. Other women had interested her, yes, but never enough to risk doing something about it. But this one… Eva wondered if her drink had been spiked, then remembered she’d watched it being made, and she’d not taken even a sip yet. But she was giddy, dizzy at this woman’s proximity, her smell that was lavender and sweat.
‘I’m looking for a letter—’
‘I know.’ The envelope, still in her pocket, felt much heavier than it should. But she wasn’t going to surrender it; she had the same feeling as when she’d refused to give up her job, as when she refused to meet Mr Burstock for a drink. It was sheer stubbornness, she knew, sheer bloody-mindedness, but she clung to it.
‘And as I said to that man made of seven varieties of shit, it’s mine.’
‘You said it was your brother’s. Jonathan Oaks in Branscombe, Devon. I heard you.’
Lucy smiled like a cat who sees a mouse out in the open, too far from its hole. ‘Ah, but I didn’t say where he lived.’
‘You must have.’ A tremble rippled her tone.
‘You’ve seen it then. You know my name’s in it. I’ve done all sorts of things to get it back, and will continue to do so. It’s mine.’ Lucy slipped off the stool, rested her hand on Eva’s arm, leaned in. ‘Bring it to me. Or else.’
‘I could take it to the police.’ Eva’s voice rose again, panicked, and Lucy’s teeth showed. The barmaid began to walk back towards them.
With their faces so close, their breath mingling, Eva saw, or thought she did, a flicker in the other woman’s eyes: uncertainty, hope, surprise, desire, then the gaze was hooded so quickly she couldn’t be sure. Lucy ran thin, soft fingers down Eva’s cheek, tapped her under the chin. ‘You won’t though, will you, hen?’
* * *
When she’d stopped trembling, when she’d four gin and tonics under her belt, when she’d slipped out the door just as Mr Burstock thundered in, when she’d tottered to the station and managed to get the right line, when she’d made it up the stairs to the two-bedroom flat she’d shared with her mother for too many years, when she’d locked herself inside, then and only then did she manage a deep, ragged sigh. She’d been panting, sharp and shallow gasps that didn’t get enough oxygen in and made her light-headed. Perhaps it had as much to do with the alcohol as anything else, she thought and gave a hiccup that became a burp, and she had to run to the bathroom.
At last her stomach stopped heaving, and she felt able to stand. Eva made a pot of tea and took it over to the sofa. She curled in her favourite spot, and took the envelope from her pocket, tipping out the contents.
The dates ran from August 1 to September 18; the handwriting was neat and assured, entirely different from that on the small blue Post-it, which looked childish by comparison. She read the entries, all the strange little pauses in a person’s life, the events, the reminders, the things that were important to them if to no one else.
A letter from Lucy.
Mark 8pm
A letter from Lucy.
A shopping list.
A movie date with Kev.
Letter from Lucy. Photos!
Kensal Green. Amanda – lunch.
A white scrap of paper Scotch-taped in, something about street photography.
Visiting Lucy!
Then almost two weeks of blank pages until Friday 13: an unhappy face and OVER underscored three times.
‘Oh, Liar-Lucy! It’s not yours at all. Why would you make diary entries about meeting yourself?’ Eva said aloud. She pondered the writer, imagined she could feel her or his excitement in the Lucy notations, the anticipation. Everything else in there was unimportant, but Lucy, oh Lucy was a beacon, someone invested with the hope of another’s heart.
Lucy.
What would it be like to be loved, to be wooed, by someone like Lucy?
Dangerous. Uncertain. Different. Oh, so exciting. There would be no ordinariness, nothing banal or commonplace – no status quo, only constant change. The idea threw a frisson down Eva’s spine that was part terror, part elation. What on earth was happening to her?
She examined the last page, with the red-brown dots – the reason, Eva was certain, the woman wanted the letter. Little stains that, when sniffed, touched to her tongue, smelled and tasted ever so faintly of old iron.
Blood.
Eva knew blood; there’d been so much when her mother had found her beneath her father, in the kitchen, on the table, when he’d thought Beth out of it. But his wife had used the sleeping pills for so long their effect wasn’t anywhere near as strong. Eva knew blood, how hard it was to clean up, how much bleach you needed to make it go away, or at least render it unidentifiable. Traces were still caught, she was sure, in the grooves of the cupboards, seeped beneath the linoleum. Her father died grunting over her, too busy to notice the knife being drawn across his throat before it was too late, before the red-black splashed across his daughter’s back, before he collapsed on top of her. Eva knew blood; she knew evidence when she saw it.
Then again, what would she do with it?
Eva booted up the ancient desktop in the corner of the dining room and googled ‘Jonathan Oaks, Branscombe’. She was utterly unsurprised to find that gentleman reported as deceased a few weeks ago, his killer uncaught. She searched for ‘Steph’ and ‘Murder’ together and found thirty-seven recent reports containing those words or fragments of them; none seemed quite right, yet none could really be dismissed.
How had Lucy tra
cked the pages? Had she panicked, overlooked things, when she’d killed their writer – Eva had no doubt the diarist was dead – then recalled only later that she’d left traces of her relationship? Had the victim’s flat or house been cleared out by family or friends or a landlord who’d shuffled as many unwanted possessions as they could to a junk shop? The death must have been cunningly disguised as a suicide otherwise she didn’t imagine the police would have let anything go. Perhaps it was someone like Eva’s own father, who’d drifted in and out of their lives as and when he wished, arriving and abandoning with the same rhythm as the ships he claimed to crew, so that the neighbours who’d long ceased to ask after him didn’t even notice when he was gone for good. Had Lucy gone back, traced whoever had cleared out the place, then gone to the shop, been told who’d bought that lot, then found Steph, and so on? Only Lucy knew for sure, but Eva could imagine the train of events.
She was pulled from her reverie by something hitting the window. Her flat looked out over the back garden. Standing in the moonlight so she could be seen, close to the stone wall that ran where, rumour had it, a corpse road once lay, was Lucy in her black and red. On the spot, almost, where Eva and Beth had buried their father and husband, deep, deep, deep, though it took them most of the night and all of their strength.
Lucy stood there and smiled. She stood there as if she knew what lay beneath. She stood there as if she’d never go away.
Eva remained at the window, palms pressed against the glass, for so long that she lost the feeling in them, either because the evening’s cold had crept through the double glazing or her circulation protested the angle of her arms. Lucy didn’t move either. Lucy stayed, never shifting, never fidgeting; she hardly even seemed to breathe.
At last, though, Eva drew away, a tiny act of defiance so hard won it almost hurt. She was filled with pride but regret, too, as if it might result in a loss. As if she might never see Lucy again.
Nevertheless, before she went to bed she took a paring knife from the magnetic strip above the kitchen sink, and slid it under her pillow. She kept the curtains closed so she wasn’t tempted to peek out at the garden and its inhabitant. And, surprisingly, she slept almost as soon as she was horizontal, one hand curled around the knife’s black plastic handle as if it were a favoured toy.
* * *
‘I don’t feel well,’ Eva said into the phone. ‘I don’t know, Alice, maybe something I ate, or just a tummy bug. Yes, yes, I’ll take care.’
When she woke she felt rested, no trace of the hangover she deserved; her slumber had been dreamless and deep. When she woke, Eva couldn’t have cared less if she never entered the old red brick building, if she never sat within its four grey walls, if she never saw her colleagues ever again.
When she woke she felt… energised. Different. She, who’d always clung to a sense of repeated order just as a drowning woman does to a scrap of floating debris. She, who never bought brand-new clothes because their difference was too much to take in. She who always shopped second-hand for things whose age gave them a familiarity so it seemed she was stepping into an old skin, not yet hers, but something she could redefine. Today, however, she felt change was brewing, coming, liable to break at any moment; she didn’t need to seek it, it would arrive all on its own. Even more strangely, it was something to be desired.
She spent the day wandering between couch and bed. She watched television shows she could feel numbing her brain as surely as a shard of ice. She read her mother’s beloved Dickens’ collected works. After five, the dark had already crept into the flat but she didn’t turn on any lights; when there was a knock at the door, and she wondered if she might ignore it, dared play dead. In spite of everything, she felt the old fear of change rear its head, threatening to overwhelm her.
But the knocking didn’t stop, and in the end she drew her dressing gown tightly around her, retying the frayed belt so it wouldn’t slip. She half-expected Lucy’s pale face and razor-sharp smile, but it was Mr Burstock, worse for wear, tie hanging loose and the top three shirt buttons undone. He swayed, the scent of stale hops wafting from him.
‘Evie,’ he half-sang.
‘Don’t call me that,’ she said, surprised by the firmness of tone, the determination. Change. Yes. Things were going to change. This was just the start: correcting people when they spoke to her in a way she didn’t like or appreciate. Showing that what she wanted counted for something. ‘Don’t ever call me that.’
He shouldered the door, and she was too small to give much resistance. She backed along the hall and he followed, one hand reaching for her. ‘Came to check on you. See if you’re all right.’ He leered and pressed on. ‘See if you were really ill or just pretending.’
He sniggered, staggered, sniggered again; tripped and almost fell, almost took them both down, but Eva slipped away, scampering on bare feet. Burstock caught himself, steadied, then nodded as if to say, All right now, sotally tober.
‘I want you to leave now. Or I’ll report you.’
‘To who?’ he boomed and laughed.
‘To management,’ she said. ‘And the police.’
‘You won’t say anything, little mouse,’ he said, low-pitched. ‘We’re friends and I choose my friends very carefully – friends not brave enough to tattle.’
He closed in and began to croon, ‘Evie. Evie, Eeeeeevieeee.’
Eva stared at Mr Burstock, but she couldn’t see him. Not his face, any road. It had been replaced by her father’s, sing-songing ‘Eeeeeevieeee’ as he always did, trying to convince her to cooperate, before he gave up any hope of collusion and chose force instead.
And Eva surprised herself yet again, by not merely standing her ground, but meeting his onrush. By reaching into her pocket where she’d put the paring knife when she got out of bed. By bringing up the not terribly sharp but sharp enough blade, and slicing across Mr Burstock’s throat.
The spray of red was warm, its pressure surprisingly firm, at least on the first few spurts. The man’s fall was strangely slow, the noise of his landing strangely loud. His face was his own again with no trace of her father in it, except the stupid expression of surprise. At last he stopped moving, stopped moaning, stopped hissing air from the wound, stopped trying to pull himself onward, then Eva considered how to manage the mess. She should have waited, played it out, and led him into the kitchen. The linoleum and the paint were easier to wash down. The carpet would have to go.
The sticky hand that held the knife was rock steady. Eva began to make a mental list of the things she’d need: new carpet, spray cleanser, more bleach certainly, heavy-duty garbage bags. He’d be hard to get down the stairs, but the Franklins in the bottom flat were away for another three weeks. She could drag him to the lounge window and toss him out, then set about digging him a place beside her father on the corpse road.
She nodded: yes.
Now that she had a plan, her field of vision expanded beyond the remains of her supervisor and she noticed, at last, that the front door was still open, and Lucy stood there. They stared at each other for what seemed a long time until Lucy stepped inside and closed the door. That was when Eva’s hand – indeed all of Eva – began to shake, but it wasn’t fear.
It was excitement, the sense that change had arrived, for better or for worse. It had been summoned. It was not going away.
Lucy stepped across Mr Burstock until they were close enough to touch if they so chose. Her voice was gentle when she said, ‘Every hunter must be blooded, Eva,’ and Eva thought she’d been very careful not to say Evie. Then Lucy held out her hand, expectant, confident.
Eva didn’t hesitate; she laughed, a short snarl of a thing.
She ran one hand up Lucy’s neck, cupped her ear, caressed her crow’s-wing hair. She leaned forward and kissed Lucy, who seemed untroubled by the gouts of blood still adhering to the other’s skin and hair. Eva felt the firmness of lips that returned her own voracious demand. She tasted saliva and the sweetness of the lemon sherbet candy the other woma
n had been sucking on, and the iron that she kissed into Lucy’s mouth. Hands moved at her waist, her shoulder, her breasts.
The letter was safe, it was hidden. One day she might hand it over. One day, and she had no doubt she’d feel lighter for the loss. But for now everything was going to change: life would be about what Eva wanted, not what others demanded.
ANGELA SLATTER
Angela Slatter has won a World Fantasy Award, five Aurealis Awards, and is the only Australian to win a British Fantasy Award. She’s published six story collections (including Sourdough and Other Stories and The Bitterwood Bible and Other Recountings), has a PhD, was an inaugural Queensland Writers Fellow, is a freelance editor, and occasionally teaches creative writing. Her novellas, Of Sorrow and Such (Tor.com) and Ripper (in Horrorology, Jo Fletcher Books), were published in 2015, and Jo Fletcher Books will publish her debut novel, Vigil, in 2016, with its sequel, Corpselight, coming in 2017. She blogs about shiny things that catch her eye here www.angelaslatter.com and she can be found on Twitter @AngelaSlatter.
“I must admit that when Conrad asked me if I’d contribute to Dead Letters he caught me at the perfect time. I’d just realised that a parcel containing a rather expensive pair of earrings that I’d sent as a gift to my best friend had not arrived, and indeed was never going to arrive. I was suitably enraged. Yes, I thought at the time, I’ll bloody well write a story about lost mail. Bastards. When I received my story-starter ‘dead letter’, I must also admit, I’d forgotten what I’d agreed to and it took a few moments to remember. But in the end the ideas that stuck with me were about identity, our own and the ones others impose on us; the things we cling to whether unhealthily or otherwise; how little things can have big and unexpected impacts; how the secrets people keep can be utterly unexpected and unsuspected; and also how love might occur in the strangest places. I’m not sure too much of my original rage made it into ‘Change Management’… although maybe it did and it just morphed from mine to Eva’s. She’s probably got more to be furious about, in all honesty.”
Dead Letters Anthology Page 28