It was like being kicked awake. They
had
been happy. She
had
had a good life. And now she had completely and utterly blown it.
Then Stephen’s hands were on her, smoothing and kneading and pummelling her body into abeyance. As he worked on her, massaging her back, her legs and deep into her scalp, spreading oil into her hair, he told her the story of their future life together. She listened, her head heavy on her forearms, and she realised how the picture he was painting was almost identical to the one she had drawn herself, in her dreams, since she had arrived in Trout Island.
After a while, his massage became more insistent and he rolled her over to face him.
She knew she had no choice but yet again to let him have her.
WHEN IT WAS OVER SHE LAY ON THE BED, PINIONED BY HIS LIMBS
, forcing herself to stay awake so she didn’t miss her moment. Eventually, when his breath became slower and fuller, the sketch of a snore, she extricated herself, taking care not to wake him. She turned to look at him as he lay there, an advert for bliss, his terrible will dormant. Aided by her myopia, she once again glimpsed a sort of beauty – the arch of his eyebrow, the angle of his lip. But it was like one of those extraordinary flowers that stink of death.
She slipped out of the bedroom and tiptoed, naked, along the corridor, leaving a scent trail of sex and neroli. She opened the first door she came to and found herself in another bedroom. Her plan was to open a fly screen and drop down to the ground from the first floor.
Thinking perhaps she might find some clothes to wear, she opened a wardrobe. Inside, she found first Stephen’s disguises for getting around incognito – Sam, Circus Guy: denim jackets and Day-Glo T-shirts. Behind them, causing her to pause and catch her breath, she uncovered a brown UPS delivery guy outfit. Beyond that hung a khaki uniform, like a security guard might wear in a supermarket car park. She frowned, trying to think how on earth—
But then she stopped, completely stunned by what she discovered next. Draped round the last hanger was a filthy beige woman’s coat with a chequered tan and turquoise silk scarf slung around it. Dangling in front of the coat was a plastic carrier bag. Horrified, Lara reached in and found a straight mousey wig, a pair of large oval tortoiseshell sunglasses and a tan baker boy cap. She examined the wig. It was clumped together in places by clots of what looked like blood.
Elizabeth Sanders – or what remained of her – was on this hanger.
Was this what Stephen meant when he said they didn’t need to worry about her any more? Lara felt sick. What was this man she thought she had known capable of?
But she didn’t have time to think. She had to move. Pulling on the soiled coat, she darted over to the window and lifted the latch. It opened easily. The fly screen presented more of a problem. It appeared to be nailed to the frame. Searching back in the wardrobe, down on her knees, rummaging around the floor, Lara found a wooden baseball bat, which she grabbed and forced against the fly screen, bending the mesh outwards. She realised she needed to use more force, so, desperate now, she used the bat to knock the edges of the screen away from the window frame. After the third bang, the thing fell out and landed on the ground outside with a clatter. Lara was halfway out of the window when the door behind her burst open to reveal Stephen, naked, levelling his gun straight at her.
She had blown it.
‘What are you doing, Lara?’ He grabbed her and pulled her back into the room, throwing her down on to the floor in front of the wardrobe so her face met the bloody wig.
‘What have you done with her!’ she said, tangling her fingers in the artificial hair, all thoughts of strategy draining from her. ‘What have you done with Elizabeth Sanders?’
‘Nothing she didn’t deserve,’ he said, lifting the gun so it pointed at her head. ‘Now, take that disgusting coat off.’
‘But what is this?’ she said, as she clutched at the wig and picked up the sunglasses, which she now noticed were cracked. ‘Is this just another costume? Was it you dressed up as her?’
‘Take the coat off.’
Crying now, Lara shook her head.
‘YOU WILL,’ he roared, ‘DO AS I SAY.’ He reached forward and ripped it from her shoulders.
‘That’s better,’ he said, suddenly calm again. He stepped back, took a deep breath, swung his weapon over his shoulder and leaned against the door post. ‘Think for a minute, Lara,’ he said, speaking slowly and calmly now, as if she were a child. ‘How could I have been Elizabeth Sanders? I was driving when we were coming back from the circus and she nearly forced us off the road, remember. Nearly KILLED US ALL.’ He closed his eyes and breathed in, flaring his nostrils, steadying himself. Then he smiled again and looked at her. ‘Even I can’t be in two places at once.’
Confused, Lara put her hands to her face and tried to blot him out of her mind.
‘If you must know, Lara, the original Elizabeth Sanders did exist. But she doesn’t any more. So I had to draft in another one. Someone tough and in need of cash. Unwittingly, Betty offered me Trudi Staines on a plate. She was, until recently, perfect, and I like perfect. Theatre background, expert in make-up to disguise that grotesque disfigurement of hers.’ Like Olly had, Stephen drew the smile shape of Trudi Staines’s scar from his mouth to his ear.
‘This, though,’ he bent forward to pick up the beige coat from where it had fallen when he tore it off her, ‘is the genuine Sanders outfit, rescued from the original back in Los Angeles and worn by her rather over-enthusiastic replacement. I’m going to have to get it cleaned up again now, which is a total pain.’ He held it up to Lara, showing her mud stains on the outside, as if it had been dragged over wet ground. He then flipped it over to reveal a darker, red-brown bloom on the inside. ‘That stupid bitch Betty put a proper spanner in the works, though.’
‘What do you mean?’ Lara’s mind was racing.
‘What an interfering old queen. The WHOLE POINT was that you would come to me, all like this,’ he waved his hands in the air, and gave a feeble wail, ‘and we’d be pushed together by the trying circumstances. But Betty stuck her big nose in where it wasn’t welcome. And to make matters worse, little Trudi started showing her real colours, started getting all difficult on me, wanting more money, threatening this, that and the other. So unprofessional. What’s a guy to do?’
Lara collapsed on the floor, sobbing.
‘Please let me go,’ she said. ‘Please?’
‘That’s ridiculous, Lara. This could be perfect. All you’ve got to do is change your attitude.’
Lara scrambled to her feet and tried to make a dash for the door. Taking him by surprise, she managed to get halfway down the stairs before he tackled her, bringing them both tumbling down on to the kitchen floor at the bottom. Lara, who had hit her head on a newel post, blacked out.
It might have been a few seconds or a few hours later, she didn’t know. But she woke to find a pain in her temple and Stephen out cold beside her on the floor, a cut on his cheek, like a felled action hero. She wondered briefly if he was still alive, but she didn’t want to miss her opportunity again. She tried the outside doors but, as she feared, they were all locked, so she fled back up the stairs to the bedroom where she had knocked out the fly screen. Without pausing, she rolled out of the window, grasping the sill with her hands, and dropped down naked to the ground beneath. As she landed, she stumbled back against a metal dustbin, sending it clattering over. Her fingertips, snagged on the window frame, were sore and bleeding and her head still throbbed, but none of this registered for her because she had escaped the house. She was free.
She looked around wildly, wondering what she was going to do. Then, with no more conscious thought than an animal heading for shelter, she fled towards the woods, across the grassy garden, where snakes lay in the woodpile, dozing against the afternoon heat.
‘LARA!’
Without stopping, she glanced back. Stephen was staggering out of the back door, blood on his face. He was on her trail. She ran and ran, thistles tearing at her feet, brambles ripping at her skin, for the cover of the trees. Her breath came in rasping sobs, but she knew this was down to fear, not exhaustion. She could do this. She was a runner, and he was barely able to stand up.
She streamed along the path, up the hill towards the heart of the forest. Anyone watching would have thought they were looking at a fleeing wood nymph. But the satyr on her tail was not on foot. If Lara had heard anything other than her own breath, her own pounding heart, it would have been the dented red Wrangler as Stephen started the engine. She pounded the ground, the steep incline no obstacle to her. The fact she had no clothes on didn’t give her the slightest pause for thought as she whipped through dogwood and alder, tripped on knotweed and dark, protruding roots. Three times she fell, three times she got up and, without stopping to brush the dirt from her sweating body, she moved on.
Running for her life.
All at once the roar was on her. She turned her head to see the monstrous red vehicle tearing up the mountain behind her, bearing up on her at an angle so impossibly steep it seemed as if it were leaping. Lara quickened her pace. As she ran, she clocked the brambled tangle of undergrowth on either side of the path. She had to do it. If she was going to get away, she had to go there.
Using the turn to propel herself, she launched off the path and into the trees and darkness, where the dazzle of sunlight was almost entirely masked by dense foliage. Her eyes took a few moments to adjust to the new conditions, but her legs kept going, flying over the bushes, shedding skin and flesh on to bystanding thorns.
And then her shin found the half-submerged, tumbledown wall, the forest secret, the leavings of a past people. Her foot, lodged in a crevice, stayed where it was as her body plunged forward. She heard the sickening crack of her own shinbone as she tumbled into the ditch at the other side of the wall, her face smashing into the dirt of a mound of newly dug earth. Soil in her mouth, her tooth cracked, her lip bitten. The world stopped and she felt a pins and needle sensation crawl over the back of her skull as she realised with a sickening lurch of horror that right up against her face was a hand. A woman’s hand, with dirt under its bitten fingernails, sticking up, out of the earth.
‘Oh, Lara. What are you doing?’
And Stephen was there, standing over her, his chest heaving, his stance unsteady. But he still had the strength to haul her over his shoulder and pile her into the back of the Wrangler. After that the pain of her leg, as it was carelessly lifted and shifted into the vehicle, made sure she knew nothing more.
MARCUS WAS WORKING LATE AGAIN, AND HAD TOLD BELLA TO GET
in a Pepperoni Special from the village pizza shop. At least it had forced her out of her bedroom, and the walk had made her feel a little less like death. But only a little.
It was a complete pain her mother being stuck up at Stephen Molloy’s place. Her dad was too busy rehearsing to do any shopping or cooking. And as for Olly, forget it. Even though she had spent most of the time holed up in her stinking bedroom, she suspected her freak of a brother hadn’t been home for over two days. He was no doubt running around in the woods, taking drugs and killing small animals. Well, she was glad. The longer he stayed away, the better.
At least she hadn’t been lumbered with Jack. Gina down the road had him for this, the third night of their mother’s absence.
As she reached the house she saw the dog sitting on the front lawn, in his usual position. He had posted himself there nearly all the time her mother had been away.
‘Hello, boy,’ she said, going over to pat him on the head. He gazed up at her with his droopy, doleful eyes, his interest piqued by what was in her big, grease-stained package.
She went inside, opened the box and tore off two slices. She carried one out, oily-fingered, and threw to the dog, who ate it in two swift gulps. Then she went back indoors, switched on her mother’s laptop and tried to eat the other slice, the first thing to pass her lips since Olly had attacked Sean. It hadn’t seemed right to eat. But now, although she had no appetite, she was so hungry a part of her felt like it was detaching itself from her body.
The MacBook gave its usual welcome chime and Bella typed in the password her mother thought was secret. She launched Safari and logged into her own Facebook account to check what her friends back home were up to. Looking at the flash-lit photographs of her blurry peers falling over each other at beach parties and sharing balloons full of laughing gas at summer festivals, she felt very homesick, a long way away from everything she knew and loved.
She glanced at her private messages, and quickly deleted a depressing little note from Jonny, Olly’s stool pigeon, saying how miserable he was, why hadn’t she been in touch and that Brighton was boring without her.
Bollocks to that, she thought.
She scanned the rest of her inbox.
She wished she could speak to Sean. She had even, on her only other sortie from the house, gone round to his place. But, thinking of his mother’s voice, she hadn’t been able to pluck up the courage to climb the steps to his front door. She had searched Facebook for his name, but he wasn’t there. It was as if he had been deleted from her life.
It was probably just as well, she thought gloomily.
She read and trashed a couple of invitations to parties she couldn’t go to, and an accusatory little missive from her friend Kat, wondering where the hell she was. The last unread message, entitled
Lookee here
, was from someone called
Your Friend
. Thinking it was probably some sort of spam or boring game app, she nearly binned it without opening it.
Instead, she took a bite of pizza and clicked it open.
What greeted her was a series of photographs, all taken from the same viewpoint, of her mother and Stephen Molloy on the porch of his house. Frowning, Bella bent forward to take a closer look. In the first picture, they were standing close together by the door, their backs to the camera. The second showed him turning her, his hand on her back. This brought their faces round so the camera was fully trained on them. He was pointing something out to her.