Chapter Thirty-Five
THIRTY-FIVE
I storm upstairs, my head spinning. My jaw is clenched, teeth grinding together until I hear the squeak of enamel in my ears. I shove open the door of Billy’s room and kick it closed so hard it bounces off the frame and swings back open again. Outside, someone is letting off firecrackers. I crawl over the unmade bed and open the window, leaning out on the sill. There are people in the road, clustered together, talking and laughing. The atmosphere seems anticipatory, even excited. Some of them are carrying slabs of timber taller than they are, old knuckled branches, broken wooden pallets. I remember Alice saying “That’s why we have the Riddance with the costume and the bonfires” and wonder if they will build them up on the green, flames so high they lick the tops of the trees. Outside, the air is so heavy you could swim through it. It smells like burning plastic and warm metal and in the east, out toward the hills, dark clouds are massing. Sam had said the weather was going to break, hadn’t he? It’s a long drive back to Baldhu. I hope he’s still talking to me by the end of it.
Sighing, I reach down and grab my case, hauling it onto the bed. I hadn’t brought much with me, and most of what I did bring is crumpled on the floor. Oscar always bemoaned my messiness, reminding me I wasn’t a student anymore so I should stop behaving like one. I sigh again. I don’t want to think about Oscar, either. Right now, the world feels full of people who don’t particularly like me very much. Propped on the desk next to my toiletries is the photograph from Crete, the one with my dead brother in the background, eyes silvery and wide. I smooth out the creases in it with my fingertips, tears pinching my sinuses and burning the back of my throat. I say his name, just once in the empty room, let it be swallowed up by the hot, soupy air.
It was raining the day Eddie died. It made a soft hushing noise at the glass, like silk moving over polished floors. The light was hazy and gray and the ice had been black underneath and Eddie was in the bed, face gaunt and skeletal, eyes too big for his skull. “It hurts, Mina,” he said. “Let me put the blanket over you,” I whispered and Eddie put his hand on mine—God, he was so cold! “Tell me about the ice,” he said so I told him the story of the night of heavy snow and the morning of the frozen pond and how cold and blue the water had been and how he’d saved me, even though he had been so afraid and by the time I’d finished telling it he was gone.
I gulp, wiping tears away. It’s nearly four. I have to pack. We’ll be leaving soon, me and Sam. I drag my suitcase toward me and that’s when I see the shorts I was wearing the day before, exactly where I left them in a heap on the carpet. I think of Oscar telling me about blue moons and the Old English word “belewe,” meaning betrayal, and then I remember the envelope I found in Bert’s record sleeve. A sensation of cold prickles over my skin. I reach into the pocket and pull it out, slightly crumpled. I hesitate for a moment, thinking about Mary sending an SOS to the girl on the other side of the wall, and then I slide the envelope open with the tip of my finger.
I don’t know how long I sit there in that small, stuffy room, sweat coating me in a shimmering aura, making my hands slippery. I sift through the photographs feeling sick, feeling heavy. Young women. No, girls.
Riddance girls.
A dozen of them. Shaky Polaroid pictures, badly lit, lazy. Skirts lifted, shorts lowered to the knees. Tan lines on shoulders, intimate moles and sprays of freckles against pale skin, rib cages stark on narrow, adolescent frames. The eyes are always the same, slightly closed to show crescents of white, lips parted, slack, heads turned to the side. They are all lying down. They are all unconscious.
“There are a lot of Riddance girls in this town,” Bert said, “Lots of girls who needed help to find their way out of the dark.”
GoodRiddanceGoodRiddanceGoodRiddance. My mind loops back to the conversation I had with Alice in her bedroom. The smell of the chimney was ash and sulfur, wisps of smoke. “He makes us funny little cocktails… he calls them Bertinis.”
Alice’s skin is wan, caught in the camera flash, striped dress shoved upward to reveal a pair of yellow knickers, the shallow depression of her belly button. My stomach rises and falls like the swell of a wave. It’s tidal, this feeling. Of being dragged and lifted, a sensation of overwhelm.
There is a glass half-visible in the foreground of one photo, slightly blurred. It’s a cloudy pink liquid with chunks of pineapple floating on the surface. What had he put in them, these Bertinis? Rohypnol? Ether? Laudanum? That seemed like Bert’s style. Something old-fashioned and melancholy, like a sober Victorian ghost. I’m sure the truth will be much more pedestrian; sleeping pills crushed into powder and weighed carefully on a dull afternoon, that clock in the kitchen tick, tick, ticking, slicing away the minutes of a life he was starting to despise. He would have been careful not to put too much in. He would have done his research, made sure of everything. Too much and someone dies or gets brain damage. Too little and they would be stumbling and slurring.
I think back to Sam saying “Sometimes Alice gets sick, gets headaches.” How she had to take so much time off school her parents had pulled her out. I wonder if each period of sickness tied in with her visits to Bert and Mary, the after-effects of whatever he was spiking her drink with lingering for days.
Then I remember Lisa telling me how she’d passed on her rotten headaches to Alice and pick up the photo of the knocked-out young girl with the slightly rounded stomach and pink smock dress. I stare at it before hanging my head to my chest and forcing deep, muscular breaths into my lungs. The images are printed onto the insides of my eyelids, the walls of my skull. Fern telling me that Lisa was a Riddance Girl— she’s another one, she knows what’s coming —and there she is, her photograph shaking in my hand. Teenage Lisa, her blond hair looking fairer and finer in the camera flash, Alice inside her, gestating.
The final photograph is a young girl with pink hair and a bloodied ear that looks as if a piercing has become infected. Her face is obscured but the scars on her arms are visible, this time fresh, pink, and raw-looking. Lines carved into her arm, a way to feel something. To hurt. Fern. She would have been fourteen when she was staying with Bert and Mary so that would mean this picture was taken about ten years ago. The rest of the girls I don’t know or recognize but I bet people around here do. I bet they all watched them have a Riddance, these troubled adolescents. All these young bodies stretched out like sacrifices. That same sensation persists of being dragged by a violent undertow that sucks the sand from beneath my feet.
“I was a troubled kid,” Fern said. “They took me in.” Did Mary know what was happening? I don’t think so. Hadn’t Alice and Fern both said how quickly she’d fallen asleep? I wonder if Bert was mixing her cocktails a little stronger, with a little more kick. No, I don’t think Mary knew. At the end, maybe. When she had found the photographs. That’s why she was trying to draw my attention any way she could. To rat that fucker out before she died.
A strange memory occurs to me. My mother, drying the flowers my father had given her for their wedding anniversary—big, blousy red roses, sweet and fragrant—she hung them upside down in the window of her bedroom. One afternoon, I was only about three or four I think, I climbed up there to get another smell of them, that delicate perfume that made my toes curl; like warm milk and honey and powdered Turkish delight. One of the brittle little heads snapped off in my hand and when I peeled it apart the petals at the center had blackened and grown rotten, infested with tiny crawling bugs. I screamed so loudly my mother came in at a run carrying baby Eddie in her arms. The dark hearts of things, riddled with worms.
I open my eyes and the room spins. I close them again and see the bloodied rabbit cadavers on the table, the bucket of leporine heads, black eyed and bucktoothed. Freckled collarbones and tiny flowers on the fabric of underwear, eyes slightly open, loose jaws, small teeth.
Something disturbs me then and I look up, my face streaked with tears. Bert is standing in the doorway, cast slightly in shadow. I don’t know how he managed to sneak up on me so quietly. He must have crept up the stairs, glided over the carpet, maybe. I wonder when he noticed the photographs were missing, how soon he realized that I must have taken them. Last night, after the undertakers had left? This morning, as dawn broke? No wonder he wants me gone. No wonder he wants me to leave quietly.
“I’ll call the police,” I tell him flatly. It doesn’t sound like a threat. I’m not brave enough. My voice wobbles with emotion. Bert smiles, not unkindly. He shakes his head.
“No, you won’t, Mina. Not after what you did.”
He pulls the door closed, and I can only sit and stare in astonishment as I hear the click of the key turning in the lock. I’m suddenly struggling to draw breath, a sensation of choking filling my throat. It’s frightening, and I want to cry out for Sam, for help, but there is nothing I can do. Maybe this was how Eddie felt as the pneumonia clogged his lungs like molten molasses, the rain against the window, the pillow in my hands. The pillow in my hands. The pillow in my hands.