Siobhan #2
Whoever Zara’s source was, they must be legitimate to know Haina’s name. Siobhan wonders which of the guests might consider talking to another filmmaker after what happened last time, or whether it’s someone she’s never met, someone who only arrived at the house once she’d left.
No. No point in thinking about any of that tonight.
Siobhan takes a seat at the island, where Owen has laid out neat little dishes of olives and nuts. He appears behind her to peel her leather jacket from her shoulders. He drapes it on the back of her chair then returns to stir something bubbling on the hob. “Hope you like fettuccine Alfredo.”
Siobhan stabs an olive with a toothpick. “I don’t know what that is.”
“Oh, it’s just pasta. With cream and Parmesan.”
On the wall, next to his head, is a magnetic strip from which hang more knives than Siobhan has ever seen in one place: great big cleavers and mean little blades like scalpels.
He sees her looking at them and clears his throat like he’s about to make a joke.
Before he can, Siobhan says, “You cook a lot?”
“More enthusiasm than skill, I’m afraid, but yes. Though I rarely have anyone to cook for.”
Siobhan rolls the olive around on her tongue.
It’s so salty it makes her mouth pool with saliva.
Owen turns back to the stove, stirs the pot, picks up a bunch of parsley then quickly puts it down again.
He’d seemed so confident when he’d messaged her this afternoon – sure and assertive.
Now he doesn’t seem to know where to look or what to do with her.
She’s out of context in here. Something essential about her is at odds with his bookshelf of curated cookbooks and the fresh sourdough loaf by the toaster.
He knows it and she knows it. It makes her feel bold.
“I’ll pour the wine,” she says, reaching for the bottle.
“Ah! Of course, sorry, I should have done that. What a shoddy host.” He reaches into a high cupboard and brings down two glasses.
They’re impractically large and sparkling.
She wonders if she imagines that his hand is shaking slightly as he sets them down in front of her.
She pours for them both and they clink their glasses just a little bit too hard. “Cheers,” she says.
He leans against the island, loosening a fraction. He sips the wine, barely disguising his wince at the taste, then says quietly, “You know, I wasn’t sure whether you’d come.”
“No?”
“I didn’t know if it was a bit, you know… weird of me, to ask.”
“Why would it be weird of you?”
Owen holds her gaze for a long second, as if her words are a knot to untangle, a test to pass, then looks away with a contained laugh. “Oh, you know. You used to be one of my students.”
“Used to be.”
He shrugs, wipes his hands on his apron. “I just hope it isn’t inappropriate. I would never want you to feel uncomfortable.”
“It can be hard to know where the lines are,” Siobhan offers, keeping her voice flat.
Owen hesitates, clears his throat. “Obviously if I was still teaching you, I would never—”
“Do you think it’s inappropriate?” Siobhan interrupts. She swivels on her stool so that she can face him, and her knees brush the front of his apron. “Do you not want me here?”
The thick knuckle of his Adam’s apple bobs up and down. It’s dizzying, to know she can make a grown man this nervous. “Of course I want you here.”
The room has started to feel a little too warm. A bitter smell is coming from somewhere, and Siobhan glances over his shoulder at the hob. “I think something might be burning.”
Owen blinks, as though she’s woken him from sleepwalking, then slams his glass down so hard on the island that the wine sloshes up and over the sides. “Shit, the sauce.”
It’s almost endearing to watch him panic, muttering to himself as he scrapes the bottom of the pan and turns up the extractor fan until it’s too loud to talk over.
Siobhan gets the sense that things are constantly slipping out of his control, that it might even be a source of insecurity for him, this inability to keep his composure.
She leans back, sipping her vinegar wine.
“Right,” Owen announces theatrically a few minutes later, once he’s plated up.
His cheeks have grown ruddier and his forehead looks damp.
“Bon appétit.” He sets a steaming bowl of pasta in front of her.
It’s piled high and topped with parsley.
She could probably live off a serving this size for a week.
“You’ll have to excuse the burnt bits.” He takes a seat opposite her on the island.
As Siobhan takes her first mouthful, she wonders how long it’s been since she had a hot meal.
Probably the last time she was at her mum’s.
At home, she lives off cereal and coffee, the occasional instant ramen, leftover popcorn from the Showroom.
The pasta is thin and silky, the sauce almost indecently decadent, thick with cream and Parmesan, only a hint of burnt bitterness.
The liquid splashes her cheeks, her white T-shirt.
She feels Owen’s gaze on her as she eats but they don’t talk, listening instead to the tinkling of forks against plates and the low rumble of the radio Siobhan hadn’t realised was on.
An old Van Morrison song is playing, one her mum loves, one she says reminds her of Siobhan and Theo’s dad before he drank.
When she can’t take another bite, Siobhan sets down her fork and raises her glass to Owen. “You can make that for me every single day.”
“Gladly.” He grins. Then, after a pause, “I like having you here. I like being in your company.”
“All I’ve done is eat.”
“Maybe I find you intriguing. Mysterious.”
Siobhan fights the urge to roll her eyes. She tops up their glasses. “If you tell me I’m not like the other girls, I’m leaving.”
“Sorry, I know you’re far too smart to patronise,” he says. “I wouldn’t mind getting to know you better, is what I mean.”
He removes his apron and hangs it carefully on a hook by the oven.
Underneath, he’s wearing a navy-blue shirt, a discreet designer logo at the cuff.
He is the type of man who cares about keeping his shirts clean, she notes, composing her growing litany of him.
The type of man who gets irritated when the sauce burns.
She wonders what all the clues might add up to.
She watches him sweep crumbs from the island into his hand then into the bin.
He wipes the corner of his mouth with a napkin.
“What do you want to know?”
He tilts his head from side to side like a metronome, clicking his tongue. “Why aren’t you making films anymore?”
“Straight for the jugular.”
“Is it a sore subject?”
Siobhan swallows, swirls the wine in her glass. What’s the point in lying? “Something happened. When Theo and I were making that documentary.” At Hex House, she says in her head. “I suppose I couldn’t face it after that.”
His eyes are on her, on the twin arches of her collarbones, the way their knife edges press upwards into her skin. She waits for him to ask what happened, but he doesn’t, so she says, “We found something out about the woman who ran… the cult. She was doing something to the guests there.”
Why are the words tumbling out like this? Zara’s email. Haina is dead. Reading those words had felt like finally letting a wound bleed, just a little.
“Doing something to them?” Owen’s voice has grown low, serious. Maybe he can sense it, too – the presence of something new in the room with them, breathing against their necks.
She could tell him everything. What’s stopping her now?
Haina is gone for good, and freedom from the pressure of keeping this secret is only a matter of words away.
She tries to think about what Owen will do, if he’ll believe any of it.
She’d kept the details of the commission vague with anyone who asked, knowing what their reaction would be.
Will he shut down the second she says Hex House?
Laugh at her, tell her it’s nothing but lore designed to scare children?
Perhaps he’ll think she’s seriously unwell and attempt to comfort her, console her, all while subtly edging her out of the door.
The words are heavy bullets on her tongue but they’re impossible to fire.
Instead, she says, “She was doing something… unethical. Theo and I disagreed on how to handle it. That’s why we don’t talk anymore.
It’s why I can’t even pick up a camera.” She swills the bitter liquid in her mouth and swallows. “It’s pathetic, I guess.”
Owen is quiet for a long moment. The kitchen has grown cooler, and the cream is congealing on their abandoned plates. “Sounds like it would have made for a hell of a documentary.” They lock eyes for a second, and he looks away first. “Come on. Let’s go and sit somewhere a bit more comfortable.”
He shows her into a high-ceilinged living room with walls of warm orange.
It’s low-lit and cosy, soft carpet underfoot.
One wall is taken up entirely by books – The Story of Cinema in 50 Palettes, The Stanley Kubrick Archives – one by a flat-screen TV, and another by framed vintage film prints.
Siobhan peers into the lens of James Stewart’s binoculars on an enormous poster for Rear Window.
She feels Owen come up behind her. He takes a long time to speak.
“I don’t want to be too forward,” he whispers.
“But this can be whatever you want it to be. You’re in control here.
I hope you know that.” His words come out so easily, as if he’s long perfected their ambiguity, as if he’s said them before.
Maybe many times. She turns to face him. “What do you want, Siobhan?”
What does she want? It’s been a long time since she’s been asked that.
She wants to be drunk all the time with no consequences.
She wants Theo to talk to her again. She wants to feel nothing and everything, to be nowhere and everywhere.
She wants to be the version of herself she was before Hex House.
She wants Owen to touch her and she wants to never see him again.
She wants to stop dreaming about the beating of wings.
“I want to stop being afraid,” she says eventually.
Owen reaches out his index finger to brush a strand of dark hair from her face. “You don’t have to be afraid of me.”
“Not you.” She expects her voice to shake, but it’s steely. “I’m afraid of myself.”
He flinches slightly, and she wonders what he sees in her face. She wonders if fury shows through the skin and what colour it might be.
“Am I really in control?” she asks quietly. “Am I in control of this? Us?”
“Of course.”
“What I say goes?”
“If that’s what makes you feel comfortable.”
“Okay then. Undo your top button.” Her stomach is fizzing as she says it. He laughs, and she smells parsley and wine on his breath. “Now,” she whispers, and something changes in his face. Something ignites.
He holds her eye, undoing the button with one hand, quick fingers. The skin underneath is paler than his neck, dark hair creeping up from his chest.
“And the next one,” she says.
He does so, and the next, and the next. She catches the slight hitch in his breath that he’s trying to hide. He stands facing her, a smile waiting at the edges of his lips. His arms hang limp at his sides. He looks vulnerable, unprepared.
“Close your eyes,” she whispers.
He hesitates and makes a sound of resistance that’s almost a word. Then he closes his eyes.
Siobhan looks at him, pristine shirt half-undone, cheeks flushed with expectation, eyelids quivering.
She leaves the living room, leaves him standing there.
She goes back to the kitchen and smears two fingers around the edge of his pasta bowl, collecting a dollop of thick sauce.
One finger she places in her mouth, relishing the cold saltiness, the other she smears onto the sparkling surface of the island.
Just before she closes the front door behind her, she hears Owen call her name.