Siobhan #2
Zara takes a seat on the sofa. If she has an issue with the way it sags underneath her, or the pile of clothes teetering on the arm, she doesn’t show it.
She unpacks the takeaway boxes while Siobhan rinses plates and glasses and brings them through to the coffee table.
She pours them each a generous measure of vodka, watching Zara heap their plates high with chow mein and spring rolls.
“Cheers,” Zara says, picking up her glass.
“To what?”
Zara shrugs. “To whatever. To vodka.”
They clink glasses. Siobhan starts to feel calmer when she’s drained hers, when the spirit wraps itself around her senses and dulls them, files off all their edges.
They don’t speak for a while, so Siobhan can hear the fierce wind that’s picked up outside.
The flat’s old windows tremble in their frames.
“Thanks for giving me another chance,” Zara says eventually, through a mouthful of food.
Siobhan doesn’t touch hers. “I don’t want to talk about Hex House. I can’t, not tonight.”
“That’s fine,” Zara says quickly – too quickly. “We can talk about whatever.”
Siobhan watches her taking delicate sips from her glass, wincing each time. Her nails are long and painted dark red. She finds herself looking at the small eye tattoo she’d noticed last time, staring out at her from just below Zara’s thumbnail, always watching.
“I like that tattoo,” she finds herself saying. “The eye.”
Zara holds out her hand to look at it, bending her thumb so that the eye appears and disappears from Siobhan’s sight. “I got this one for my little sister,” she says. Her voice is small and tight. “She died, a while ago.”
The polite thing to say would be, I’m sorry, but Siobhan has never felt helped or particularly reassured by that sentiment, so she says nothing.
Zara rolls up her sleeve, exposing skin crowded with artwork: snakes, mermaids, moons and delicate flowers.
“I feel like when you’re a journalist, you use other people’s stories for your own means,” she’s saying.
“It’s exploitative. It’s pretty fucking selfish.
I’ve always felt really aware of that. I think that if you’re going to benefit from using someone else’s story, then you should at least carry some of its weight.
So I started getting something tattooed on me for each one.
” The way she speaks doesn’t seem to seek validation or response, but there is a smugness to it, as if she’s proud of this particular principle and likes what it says about her.
She taps her finger to a tiny teddy bear on her bicep.
It has simple, cartoon features: two beady eyes, a single curved line for a smile.
“I went freelance pretty much straight after graduating, and this was from the first story I ever worked on. Way before SunWolf. It was for a podcast about people who’d been missing for a long time, decades, sometimes.
Jared Peach, that was his name. He’d be…
thirty-five, I think, now. He went missing on a trip to Portstewart beach when he was four.
His mum has been looking for him ever since and can’t really think of him as a man, as ever being taller than her, ever growing facial hair.
I think she’s still expecting to find a little boy with ice cream smeared around his mouth and sand on his knees.
She keeps his bedroom exactly as it was the day he went missing: water beaker on the side, Lego scattered across the floor, teddy bear on the pillow.
” She rolls down her sleeve, laughs gently.
“I’m a giant sketchpad. My parents used to call tattoos ‘devil marks’.
When I’m sad, I think about how horrified they’d be if they could see me now, just to cheer myself up a bit. ”
“You don’t talk to them?”
“Nah. I had kind of an intense childhood. Me and my sister moved up here as soon as we could, but she… she didn’t last long.”
The words hang heavy in the air and Siobhan has the feeling that if she were to prod Zara for more details, even gently, it would all come tumbling out.
She’s the kind of person who likes to talk, it seems, who is generous and loose with their words.
Perhaps it helps her, to say these things out loud.
But Siobhan doesn’t ask. She tops up their glasses and listens to the wind hurling itself against the window.
“You haven’t touched your food,” Zara says.
“Not really hungry.”
“Right. Well, keep some in the fridge, then. You might want it tomorrow and I can’t be bothered to take it home.”
Siobhan knows how she must look to Zara.
She’s noticed it while studying her reflection in the mornings, wrapping her body in a towel after a shower: her thinness.
She wonders whether her cheeks have always been so hollow, her ribs so sharp-looking, the circles under her eyes so stormy and dark.
She wonders how long it’ll be until she simply fades away.
“Siobhan,” Zara says eventually, “why did you want me to come here tonight?”
Siobhan stares at the old water rings on the coffee table. “I just didn’t want to be alone with it all.” She clears her throat, doesn’t meet Zara’s eye. “I don’t know how much longer I can hold it all in.”
“You don’t have to hold it in.” Zara puts down her glass and shifts closer to Siobhan. She smells clean, like pine and citrus, and a little bit like fried noodles. “We can tell the story in any way you want to tell it.”
“I don’t know how to,” Siobhan whispers. “I don’t know where to start.”
Zara nods. She tucks her bright red hair behind her ears, then leans back into the sofa.
She’s moving slowly, as if she’s handling something made of delicate porcelain.
“Starting’s the hardest part, I reckon. But it’ll get easier.
I use a room in the university library for all my interview recordings.
It’s small and safe and no one else would hear us.
” Surely SunWolf has a studio, Siobhan thinks absently.
She wants to see it, to glimpse the life she might have had, a life Sylvie is about to step into – but she doesn’t have the energy to press the point.
“We could meet there tomorrow and have a chat. You could just see how you go. We’ll obviously pay you for your time, give you a production credit.
” In a lower voice, she adds, “You could let me hold some of that heaviness for you. You deserve that, after all this time.”
Siobhan doesn’t think she does deserve that.
She doesn’t deserve Zara’s soft voice and her kind words and her careful approach.
She doesn’t deserve to be brought food, for someone to care about whether or not she’s eating.
What she does deserve is to have to live it all again, to be forced to look at it for what it is, to own her part in the whole awful mess.
She owes it to Elly, to Theo – she owes it to all of them.
“You don’t know what you’re getting yourself into,” she tells Zara. “You should just walk away now.”
Zara holds her gaze. A long moment passes. “I can’t,” she says quietly, and Siobhan senses weight behind the words, a tangled web of meaning she can’t unravel tonight.
Siobhan drains her glass. “Fine. Tomorrow.”
* * *
The next day, Siobhan wakes to a hangover that is fierce and raging, a riptide in her stomach.
After Zara left, she’d finished the vodka and fallen asleep on the sofa, the edge of the cushion pressing a deep groove into her cheek.
The half-empty takeaway boxes are still sitting open on the coffee table leaking smells of fat and grease, and she has to swallow down vomit as she boils the kettle for coffee and splashes cold water onto her face.
The flat feels hollow and quiet again and she almost wishes Zara were still here; Zara, who talks to fill silences and chews with her mouth open.
The oven clock tells her it’s 11:29 a.m. She’d arranged to meet Zara at the university at 1 p.m., so she has time to drain the contents of the cafetière and make another before she needs to leave.
She uses the bitter, cooling coffee to swallow two ibuprofen before showering quickly and pulling on an old pair of jeans, holes at the knees and loose at the waist, and an old hoodie of Theo’s.
Before leaving the flat for the university, she checks her phone to find two new messages.
The first is from her mum, recommending a documentary from a young Italian filmmaker on Netflix: has she seen it yet, might it provide her with some inspiration maybe, get her back into things?
The second is from an unknown number. As she reads it, her mouth goes dry and the coffee spikes through her veins, making her pulse hammer.
Shiv, it’s Theo. This is my new number. I’ve written and deleted this text ten times already and I really actually don’t want to send it, but I need to know about this new documentary.
I need to know what you’re going to say.
This doesn’t change anything, I’m not interested in having you in my life, but we need to talk about this first. Let me know when you’re free.
Siobhan rereads the text a couple of times, puts her phone down on the coffee table then picks it up, reads the message again. Her fingers are trembling as she types her reply.
I’d love to talk. I’m free anytime. I can call you now?