Chapter 2 Grace
The room is white, too white. A punitive white, a white that doesn’t reassure so much as erase. It takes and it takes until your edges fray, and you question whether you even have colour at all.
Against it, I feel like a stain.
A nasty little thing that shouldn’t be here. And if I had my way, I wouldn’t be.
The paint is gloss; my breath leaves a faint mist on it if I angle my mouth just right. It’s the only proof I have that I’m alive, that I’m really here. There is no texture on the walls except for the subtle waves where the paint thickened and dried wrong.
I have learned those waves like a reader learns the heartbeats between chapters. I know where one bulges like the knuckle of a fist, and where another thins like paper over flame. My fingertips learned those curves weeks ago when I was first shut away here.
There is a bed.
There is a chair.
There is a table that pretends to be a desk but has no drawers.
There is a light panel that cuts across the ceiling and obeys someone else’s hand because there are no sockets, no switches, nothing for me to control.
There is a door without a visible handle on my side.
There is a camera set into the upper corner of the room, a black little bead embedded like a tick in plaster.
The air is so clean it hurts. It carries the faint sting of antiseptic and something medicinal, like the ghost of diluted bleach, as if this room is perpetually preparing for an injury that never arrives.
I sit on the bed with the sheet folded into a precise rectangle, the way Mrs Vale prefers. This is not because I care what Mrs Vale prefers I, it’s because I refuse to give her the gift of saying I’m sloppy and making me redo the whole thing again.
One thousand, four hundred and thirty-five days.
That is the number that sits behind my eyes when I blink.
One thousand, four hundred and thirty long or short, depending on how you count time, and then I’ll be twenty-one, the age of the auction block.
The arithmetic of our empire is exact, the ledger of flesh impeccably tallied.
I become no longer a thing in waiting but a trophy, a spoil of war bought and sold to the highest bidder.
I remember the world beyond the white; the luxurious expanse of my father’s houses, the marbled floors that drank the stride of our shoes, the rich red of the finest wines, and the glittering gold of power moving about my parents like flies.
It’s the one I should be living in, the one I deserved to live in.
I sit purposefully, my back a staff, my chin level with the door, burying that rush of rage.
It does no good to think it, it does no good to feel it. Rage is useless now. Anger, bitterness, all emotions that in the end will do nothing but add to the maddening torture of my current existence.
There is a camera watching, and beyond the camera there is a woman watching the feed with what she claims is care, and what I know is counting. She counts how often I move, how long I sleep. How many ounces of water I drink by the calibrated glass, how many calories I accept, how many I leave.
I know beyond her there are others. Men, politicians, CEO’s, all of them Lords. All of them waiting just like I am until that clock finally strikes midnight, and I become the pumpkin whose flesh they can devour.
The camera clicks as it adjusts. I do not look at it.
“Miss Ratcliffe.”
The intercom’s voice is Mrs Vale’s voice made lightly metallic, like pouring tea through a sieve. I feel the vibration of her words in the air vent. I do not answer, and I do not move. She does not wait for me.
“It is time.”
The lilt of Mrs Vale’s voice is British by way of finishing schools.
Her mouth is a perpetually thin line of disapproval.
She has hair that could be called silver if silver did not imply softness, and glasses she doesn’t need, both for reading the screen and for seeing me.
She puts them on when she wants to look like a headmistress in a bedtime story, the kind where bedtime is when you pray your stepmother won’t come.
The door opens with a wisp of noise, and all I can see beyond is more white. She is there in her grey suit, holding a tablet as if it were a hymn book.
I do not say good morning. Morning is a word you earn by seeing the sun. I haven’t seen the sun since I was locked away here. I haven’t seen the moon, or the stars, or anything to prove I am not actually dead and damned in purgatory already.
She eyes the bed and the sheet, and she makes that small hum when I pass the test.
“How are we feeling today?” she asks me, as if a plural could make the singular more manageable. We, as in you and me, as in my jailer and I. A pretend sisterhood drawn in powder, always ready to be blown away.
“Alive,” I say because I am, and because the word is a stone skipped across her lake. It will sink eventually, but while it arcs, it makes circles.
Her face does not show that she hates my diction, my composure. The way I do not pant, pace, gnaw or plead. She thrives on collapse, and I am a spoiled feast when I refuse to collapse.
She hates the way my mouth lifts at one corner.
She hates the way my hair refuses to be contained in their approved braid, an odd curl making a rebellion of its own near my temple.
I see the way she wants to tuck it behind my ear, the way her fingers itch to do it whenever she stares at it.
But she will not, because to touch me is to compromise the role she plays; that of the observer who is above the mess of sweating bodies and bleeding hearts.
There will be time for touch later, when my body will belong to someone willing to use their hands.
The tray comes after her. A boy wheels it in. He does not look at me. He is the kind they breed for this: smooth, immaculate, politely blank.
The tray is stainless steel and dull. He sets it down on the table, aligns it with the straight edge I have made from the corner.
“Breakfast,” Mrs Vale announces, as if breakfast were a topic and not one of the few highlights of my day.
She does not sit. I do not stand. We are versions of decorum facing each other with knives behind our teeth.
I lift the dome and find obedient food: oatmeal without sugar, an overly boiled egg, half a grapefruit whose red is so intense it feels indecent. A glass of water, which is the only thing that tastes of anything that wasn’t made in a laboratory.
I have decided I love grapefruits in here, the way prisoners love their guards because their faces are the only intimate thing they see. I learn the shape of the rind under the knife; I carve it into the segments I want, not the ones they assume a girl will accept.
“You’ll want your strength.”
She often says that. As if strength is something you can pack into your body like luggage for the trip we both know I’m about to take. As if the trip were a choice, as if her words are not a spoon forcing my mouth.
“Strength,” I echo, letting the syllables rest on my tongue until they are pulp.
Her mouth flickers. “Your father…”
My fork hits the table without a sound because I take care to set it down.
“My father is dead,” I say. Dead or as good as. “Your point?”
She looks as if she tastes something sour and isn’t sure if it came from the grapefruit or from her own throat. “He would want you to be strong.”
“My father,” I tell her, “did not want me to be sold.”
That is the closest I will ever come to an indictment she can log under hysteria. I am careful with my rage, decanting it the way my father used to decant wine, letting the sediment stay in the dark where it belongs.
For a moment we stare at one another, the silence becoming almost a thing of beauty and then she tsks, swiping her hand, motioning me to continue my breakfast.
I eat half the grapefruit slowly. I leave the other half on the plate, as if it were an offering that I have declined.
I am not hungry, but hunger is a tool they can use against me.
I decide to eat the egg and count each chew.
Thirty-two. Thirty-three. The camera hums again, as if pleased with my compliance.
I could have double the time left in this place and it would still feel like a ticking clock, a bomb above my head, waiting to go off.
“You have your studies,” Mrs Vale says, tapping the tablet. “You’ll find the reading materials amended to be relevant to your situation. There are supplements. Please continue the breathing exercises. Dr. Mercer will log in at ten for your consultation. Do you require anything?”
Do I require? A question that pretends to be generous and is actually a leash.
All my requiring is pre-approved. If I told her I require my father’s hand or my mother’s voice, she would blink and mark me down for refusing the game.
If I asked for a window, she would simper.
If I asked for air, she would cite the flow rate through the vents.
If I asked for silence, she would tell me it already exists.
In this way, I am gaslit by an institution that knows how to make black look like white and pain a thing of mercy.
“Yes,” I say, tilting my head like I am tracking some bird only I can see. “I require the door.”
She smiles with her lips. It is broken, her smile. She knows I know it is broken. It is the smile a snake would make if a snake had cheeks. “Very good. I do enjoy your sense of humour.”
“Do you?” I lift the glass of water, take a sip then swallow.
“It is in your interest,” she says, “to modulate that tone.”
“They are buying a woman,” I say softly, glancing up at that ever-focused camera lens. “They may as well know what it is they are buying.”
A smirk stretches across her face. She inclines her head with a savagery that feels like a slap and then she turns, clapping her hands for the boy to come and take the tray.
“She is done eating.” She announces. “Perhaps some quiet reflection will temper that attitude.”
Reflection. That’s all I have. Nothing but these four white walls. I think they mean to make me crazy, to drive me insane. Solitary confinement is a form of torture after all – if they keep me like this for the next four years, I will surely be as rabid as a dog by the time I’m brought out.
Perhaps that is what they want. The Blakes. They want to show what we are, what my family is. They want to shame me, shame the last Ratcliffe that still has blood in their veins.
I let out a wail then slap my hand to my mouth, quickly silencing it.
I will not break.
I will not.
I will not let them see me cry.
I dig my nails into my arms, pushing hard enough to break through and draw a little blood.
The pain is good. The pain is grounding.
They will not break me.
They can keep me like this, keep me locked away like a thing half-forgotten, but I will not break for them. I will not.