Nicola Griffith (29 page)

No one tells me anything,
I replied.

But Greta had tried. Or at least she had got me the lock.

Magyar was frowning. “I’m trying to understand something. You said you thought Oster turned to you when Stella was too old. . .”

“Yes.”

“But you think Greta was abused, too.”

“Yes.”

“Lore.” Her eyes were soft, trying to tell me something, but I had no idea what. She sighed. “Tell me about the time . . . Tell me about the night the monster came to you.”

“I dreamt. At least that’s what Katerine said when I woke up with her hand on my shoulder.”

“Katerine was there when you woke up?”

“Yes.” I was puzzled.

“Lore.” She took both my hands in hers. “Just think a minute. You dreamed about the monster, and when you woke it was Katerine who was there.” I looked at her blankly. “You say Greta had been abused, too. But she was an adult by the time your mother and father married.”

“Yes. . .” I said slowly.

“Then if the abuser likes them young, it couldn’t have been Oster.”

Absurdly it was Tok who came to mind, his laugh of disbelief when I shouted at him about being mean to Katerine, demanded to know if he realized what he was doing to her: What
I
have done to
her
?

“It’s too hot in here. I have to go outside.” The air was so thick I felt as though I was swimming toward the door, fighting for breath. I leaned against the wall outside, gasping. I had forgotten to bring my coat. Through my thin shirt the bricks were hard against my shoulder blades.

Katerine on the bed, fully dressed. “It’s a dream,” she said to Oster. Oster, who was just stumbling into the room.

Magyar came out, our coats draped over her arm. She held mine out silently.

“But she’s my mother,” I said finally.

“Yes.”

My mother, the monster. Which meant Oster wasn’t a monster after all. This time I had to bend forward, head nearly to my knees, before I could get air into my lungs.

My mother, the monster. And Oster—he could be my father again. The one I thought I’d lost.

I started pulling on my coat. “I have to go.”

“Go where? Are you all right?”

“I don’t know. But I need to think.”

The air above the wharf was heavy with damp, the scent of timbers softened and swollen with rain and river water. I slipped down the right alleyway, found the panel set in the pavement, and levered it open. I laid my fingers lightly on the switches, then flipped them. The lights went out.

There was no moon and the stars hid behind soft black clouds; nothing to reflect from the water. Just me. I sat down on the wharf, careless of the cold. I could feel the river rather than see it: distended by the rains of the last two days to a thick, dark tongue feeling its way blindly to the sea. Somewhere downriver a barge bumped hollowly against its moorings. Water lapped softly at the timbers.

An old river made old sounds. The water at Ratnapida had never sounded or smelled like this. There, it fountained in the sunshine, tinkled on stone, plopped when a fish surfaced for a fly. Even the rain sparkled—fast showers, followed by rainbows and glistening grass. Young water, and lighthearted. Maybe that was why Stella had chosen the fountain as her backdrop . . .

It all seemed so different now: Stella desperate and plead ing, begging for Oster to
notice
, to do something. Giving him—and me—clues that we couldn’t see.

Katerine had watched the whole scene so calmly. Too calmly, I saw now: What mother should be able to watch her daughter like that, half naked, drunk, obviously in some pain? Why hadn’t I thought about that before? Because that’s just how Katerine was: closed up like a lacquered fan.

But not always. Something, some feeling I had never seen, never even caught a glimpse of, had prompted her to steal into her children’s room at night—Greta, Stella, me—and . . . and . . . I felt again the heat of the monster’s breath on the back of my neck and the fear, the creeping flesh feeling that something was terribly awry in my seven-year-old world.

How many times had Stella had to lie quietly through that? A mother was a foundation, a cornerstone, a touchstone, not a monster. Not the reason to kill oneself.

All the time my mother had been doing that to my sister I had wanted her to love me, had ached for her approval, had wanted her to believe I was
like
her.

I had to lean forward with my weight on my palms, I was so dizzy. Did the fact that I knew, now, what she had done make her a different person? Was I a bad person because I still wanted to be like her? And I still did. On some level I always would. It was what I had grown up with, that image of the calm, competent woman.

I didn’t want to think about it. I stared down at my hands, at the drying cobbles, the miniature riverbeds that formed between them. Here and there were discarded remnants of the tourist trade: beverage cans, a torn disk wrapper. It would all be cleaned up by midmorning.

Katerine had always liked things clean and orderly. Efficient.
That monster,
Tok had called her.
That monster can’t be allowed to get away with it.

Tok and Oster talking to the camera. Tok looking—not beaten, I realized, but exhausted. What had they done to her? Where was she? Why hadn’t they said something, anything on the net?

My mother. I imagined her carefully: tidy hair, concise conversation, economical gestures. She had never gestured much, come to think of it. And her hair was always cut the same way, though she did occasionally tint it varying shades of blond, as a concession to fashion. Her eyes . . . I had never known the color of her eyes. Did she hide them in a subconscious attempt to hide her soul?

My mother, who was all too human. She had got away with hurting her children because she was so . . . acceptable. But someone must have known. Tok had. And he had tried to tell me. Why had he taken so long to speak out?

My father should have
known
! But so should I. No: I was a child.
Not really.

Had
Oster known? I tried to remember how he had behaved that afternoon with Stella in the fountain. He had known something was wrong. He had even asked me what I knew . . .

He should have known. I couldn’t get away from that. He was my father—Stella’s father—and he should have taken some responsibility, some interest in us apart from that absurd competition with his wife to make us love him more.

He should have known. But he wasn’t a monster. And I missed him. I wanted to have him back. I’d spent the last three years believing him to be something he was not, and I wanted to touch him, maybe have him ruffle my hair, anything, just to make contact again with the father I had thought I had known.

A barge hooted from downriver, a burly morning noise. Almost dawn.

I stretched and stood, feeling strange: wobbly and light-boned. So much had changed. I had my father back, and had lost my mother. And Magyar knew who I was. She could see through the obscuring reflections. To her I wasn’t
van de Oest
, I wasn’t
Criminal
, I wasn’t
Bird.
I was just me, Lore.

Lore’s birthday came and went. Twenty. She went out in the blustery September wind with the cat’s daily ration of leftovers. As usual she knelt to push the plate under the bushes without really looking, but this time the plate bumped into something soft. She peered into the tangle of dry wood and old, dead leaves.

It was a kitten. Dead. Probably about two weeks old. Skinny. Fur the color of sand.

She looked at it a long time, then went inside to get her work gloves and spade. It weighed nothing.

Kittens should be round,
she thought. It struck her as terribly wrong for something so young to look so used-up. It should have had warm milk, and spring, and a skyful of butterflies to chase. Not a short, hard life and an end on the cold ground.

It was wrong. All wrong.

Spanner was reading. “I don’t really see what the difference is, whether you enjoy it or not.” She barely looked up from the gray book screen in her lap.

“Because it’s a lie.”
Because kittens should be round.

Spanner switched to the next page. “It’s flickering again.”

“What?” Lore was confused for a moment; then she realized Spanner was fiddling with the screen contrast. “Turn that book off and listen to me.”

Spanner turned it off, put it down on the cushion next to her. “I was listening. You were saying that if you enjoy yourself it must not be real.”

“You’re being obtuse.”

“No. It’s a job, just like any other. You don’t begrudge Jamaican cane cutters a smoke to make their work less monotonous, do you? Or Chileans a good chew of coca leaf to get them up the next mountain trail where the air’s too thin for anything except their goats. So why deny yourself?”

“Because I hate what we do.”

“You just said you enjoyed it.”

“I do, at the time.”

“Then you’d rather not enjoy it?”

“I’d rather not do it at all.”

“And you’d rather not eat, too?”

“There has to be another way! We could use a fake PIDA, a good one, to get a job. We could—”

“We have a job.”

“I hate it! It makes me feel ashamed, and I’m sick of being ashamed.”

“There’s nothing to be ashamed of. You haven’t hurt anyone.”

“I’ve hurt myself. This is
my
body,
my
—”

“Temple, right?” Spanner shook her head. “It’s not a temple, it’s a sack of meat.” She slapped herself on the thigh. “A tool made of muscle and skin and bone, to be used the same way we use any other tool.”

“No.” Lore was horrified. “Your body isn’t just a tool like a . . . a screwdriver. It
is
you. What it does and feels makes you who you are. Don’t you see that?”

“You are who you fuck?” Spanner’s eyes were challenging. “Then who does that make you?”

“Someone I’m ashamed of.” And Lore understood with blinding clarity why Stella had killed herself. To be used like a receptacle, a commodity, and to
know
it, to be helpless before it, and then to see that helplessness reflected back at her every time her eyes met her abuser’s across the table, every time she saw herself in the mirror. There would never be any way to escape that kind of shame. She looked at Spanner, who was waiting with her eyebrows raised. “What happened? What happened to you, to make you feel you have to do this?”

“Nothing had to
happen
. I’m not some pathetic victim, reacting instead of acting.” She folded her arms. “I’m simply a realist.”

Lore stared at her, then shook her head tiredly.

“You don’t believe me?”

But that was not what Lore had meant by the head shake. How could she argue against someone’s reality?

She looked at Spanner for a long time. At the hair that needed combing, the light blue eyes she had seen cry only once, at the beginning of the wrinkle on the left side of her mouth, where the muscles pulled when she laughed. She wanted to hold Spanner close, stroke her hair, tell her it was all right, she didn’t have to be a realist all the time; she, Lore, would let her dream, let her stretch and reach and
try
, and if she failed, then it wasn’t the end of the world.

But Spanner’s pupils were tiny and her arms were still folded and her face was like a mummy’s: thin, drawn too tight, used up too early. She had never had the chance to play, to laugh without calculation, without looking over her shoulder.
Kittens should be round.

Lore was suddenly very, very tired. “I’m going to lie down.”

She went into the bedroom and drew the curtains against the lights outside. The close, dark air reminded her of the tent. She felt trapped. There had to be a way out. For both of them.

She fell asleep and dreamed of Stella, surrounded by her friends at Ratnapida, laughing, watching the net charity commercials, thumbing her PIDA into the base of the screen and sending thousands to some aid organization Lore had never heard of. Then jetting off to some other island paradise to do the same thing. Always traveling. Running, running, but never getting away. Stella, who had escaped by dying.

When Lore woke it was dark, and she knew how they could escape.

I slept for nine hours and woke up feeling stiff and sore, as though my body had tried to rearrange itself physically to fit three people inside one skin. I felt denser, more closely packed. Solid and strange.

There was a message on the screen from the plant: shifts were back to normal. I had received four other calls, all aborted without leaving a message.

The flat was stuffy. I went down to Tom’s. “I brought you a recording of the. . .” I was suddenly embarrassed.
Scam,
I thought,
fake commercial,
and was ashamed. I held out the disk. He took it. “This is yours, too.” I pulled the small packet of debit cards from my pocket. “We got more than I thought. There’s about five thousand here.” It was more than the share we had agreed upon, but he needed it more than me. Now it was his turn to look embarrassed, but he took the packet. “I thought Gibbon might want a walk.”

We walked along the canal, the dog at the fullest extent of his leash. A stiff wind pushed the clouds along at a tilt and slapped water up against the banks. The air smelled of weeds and wind and Gibbon’s coat. We saw two Canada geese landing in a wide dike. Gibbon ran for them, barking and dragging me behind him, but the geese just ignored us. He wanted to run some more, so we did, feet thudding on the densely packed dirt of the towpath, mouths open.

For a while, it seemed that I ran through the fountains with Tok, that I ran through the city streets with Spanner, that I ran on my own in an older skin. I felt as though I swam through the swirling meeting point of three rivers, each at a different temperature, each tugging me this way and that. Then it was just me, and Gibbon, and a windy afternoon.

Tom was watching the net when I got back. Not the scam. Soup was heating.

“You didn’t watch it?”