Chapter 23
I checked to see if my shadow was still attached to my feet. There it was, short and stubby in the midday sunshine, like a puddle on the cobbles.
Shadows that move on their own.
No shadow-ectomies or faeries or sheep clones here. Just me.
Be yourself.
And you know who you are, don’t you?
The old ringing buzzed through my skull and my head ached.
I couldn’t get what Rowan had said out of my mind. About the costumes. About pretending to be all those different companies. And now all the old man’s talk about clones and doubles and…
My hangover wrenched my insides.
This had been a mistake. I should have stayed back at the house. I hadn’t found my neighbour. And if anything had happened in my basement last night, I’d only made myself look even more suspicious.
But nothing had happened. My neighbour was fine. She was up and out early this morning. She’d been busy with the flowers in town. She wasn’t lying dead in the belly of her home. Because I didn’t do that. I wouldn’t do that. That’s not who I am.
I felt the memory of a wet crunch of bone shuddering up my arms.
If it didn’t happen, how could I remember the sensation so well?
You know why.
I felt sick. I needed to think. I needed to calm down.
I did my best to look like I wasn’t freaking out.
Head high, arms at my side, definitely not hunching over myself and glaring at people.
I found a bench looking out over the river and hastily sat on it, resisting the urge to tuck my knees into my chest. Then I focused on the sound of the gentle rushing water and tried to breathe.
The old man was just talking nonsense, I told myself. Everything is fine, so stop freaking out. Be fine!
A group of women had stopped at the waterside nearby, phones up, taking pictures.
I arched my neck to see what they were looking at.
There was a small family of some kind of water bird dabbling in the weeds at the edge.
One large parent and a troop of fluffy chicks streaming after her.
The women threw crumbs of the pastries and cakes they’d bought at the café into the river.
Small bills whisked the water in the hunt for flakes of croissant and red velvet.
I wondered if pastry was bad for ducks, but that didn’t seem like a very popular thing to ask strangers.
Especially strangers just out for a nice photo with cute animals.
Why did we find the babies of other animals so cute?
Ducklings. Kittens. Puppies. A lot of the time the behaviour we cooed over was just early play versions of hunting behaviour.
Playing with ropes was practice for breaking small necks.
The squeak of a toy mimicked the panicked cry of prey.
Somewhere in our mammalian brains we see this and think ‘aww!’
The ducklings paddled after their mother along the river and the women left, swiping through photos, picking which ones to post. Only I was left watching the little duck family after they were gone.
Only I watched as the clouds came over and the mother led her brood away.
Only I saw as the line of ducks began to pull away from the last and smallest duckling.
I looked around. I was the only one who had noticed the straggler.
I turned my attention back to the ducks.
Perhaps the little one would catch up. Ducklings had that sudden burst of speed they could do, that little skipping across the water like a thrown stone.
As I thought it, the littlest duckling did just that.
But bit by bit the gap was still growing.
I looked around again, to see if anyone else had noticed the tragedy unfolding before me.
Perhaps someone I could lock eyes with. We’d nod and head down river.
We’d stop the mother duck. Or maybe rescue the family together.
Or perhaps just adopt the small duckling.
Have it live at my house. Paddling in my sink. Waddling about my garden.
But there was no one to lock eyes with. No one else could see what was happening.
I turned back once more and watched quietly as the gap grew and grew, and the duck family pulled further and further away from the smallest duckling.
The mother duck darted round an embankment, turned and led the family toward a bed of reeds on the other side of the river.
It was as if she—no. No, she wouldn’t deliberately leave the duckling behind, would she?
I’d heard of it happening, though never seen it until now.
When a mother senses something wrong, smells a weakness, an oddness, in her child, she’s driven to abandon it.
No point wasting effort on something that’s just going to fail anyway. Or worse, infect her healthy babies.
The duck family disappeared into the reeds, but the smallest duckling carried on in a straight line. It chirped loudly, desperate, as it kept going along the river, alone, until I could see it no more.
I pressed my lips together. See, this is why you have to pretend. Otherwise, everyone smells the sickness on you. And then you get left behind.
That’s why I’d come here.
To be better.
To pretend better.
My fingers, hands, limbs felt fuzzy and incorporeal, as if I was lifting up and out of my body, as if I’d never been in it in the first place, as if ‘I’ was a lie I’d told myself to stop the meat of my brain from going totally insane.
Why couldn’t I tell myself a better lie? Why couldn’t I pretend better?
You know who you are, don’t you?
I rubbed my eyes. The ringing had left and in its place was a hollowness, a nothing, like I was just an empty suit of skin, ready to be blown away at any moment.
If you unzipped me, I’d disappear.