Chapter 17
ROSALIE
He stops asking on the Friday.
I do not notice for two days, because it is a thing that is missing rather than a thing that is there, and by Sunday night I have worked out what it is and it is worse than being asked.
For fourteen days he has been standing in doorways saying half a sentence.
Now he does not.
He says good morning. He tells me about the coat he has bought, which is grey and which Teodoro says makes him look like a headmaster.
He asks whether I want the window open. He talks about a berth and a crane and a man called Verhoeven who has started signing things in a different colour of ink, and none of it goes anywhere, and none of it has a hole in the end of it for me to fall into.
I asked him to stop. He said all right. He has stopped.
I lie in the dark on my side of a strip of tape on the third night of it and I am so angry I cannot see.
"You are doing it on purpose."
"Yes," he says.
He is sitting on the arm of the chair by the window taking his shoes off, and the lamp is on, and he says it without any hesitation at all, which somehow makes it worse.
"You said all right."
"I did. And I meant it, and I have done it, and you have been furious for three days.
" He puts the second shoe down. "I want to be extremely clear that I am not enjoying this.
You asked me to stop doing a thing and I stopped doing it and now neither of us has anywhere to put anything, and I have thought about it for three days, and the honest position is that I do not know another way to be in a room with somebody. "
"Then learn one."
"Yes," he says. "All right."
Here is the problem.
I have something in my hands and it has been in my hands for eleven years and there is nowhere in this world to put it down.
You cannot tell another asset. There are nine of them and every one of them is somebody else's leverage and every conversation any of us has ever had has been a conversation in a room with a man in it.
You cannot tell Hanno. Hanno is the mechanism.
There has never been a third option. Nineteen years and there has been no third option, and now there is a man sitting on the arm of a chair four feet away who has stopped asking me things because I told him to, and he is going to keep not asking, forever, if I let him.
That is the trap.
He has not set it. That is what I want to be accurate about. He has done exactly what I asked him to do and the trap is that I now have to open my own mouth.
"Sit down properly," I say.
"What?"
"You are on the arm. Sit in the chair."
He sits in the chair.
"Turn the lamp off."
"Rosalie."
"I cannot do it with the lamp on."
He turns the lamp off.
There are nine of them.
That is the first thing I say into a dark room and it comes out at completely the wrong volume, too loud, the way thank you did, because I have no idea how to pitch a sentence I have never said.
"Nine," he says.
"There were eleven when I was small. Two went out and did not come back. There have been nine since I was twenty two."
"Go on."
"They live in the propagation wing. It was a horticultural station and the propagation wing is the long one on the north side with the glass roof, and there are nine beds in it, and there is a wall down the middle that was put in in the nineties and it is plasterboard and you can hear everything.
" I have my back against the headboard and the tape is under my shoulder blades.
"It is cold. It has always been cold. There is heating and it works and they run it for four hours a day between five and nine, and the reason is not money. "
"What is the reason?"
"Because you sleep better warm."
Nothing from the other side of the bed.
"They have names," I say. "Intake names.
You get one when you arrive and it is the only thing you answer to and after about a year you stop being able to remember the other one.
Wisteria. Lily. Hazel. Juniper. Marigold.
Iris. Bay. Fern." I say them the way I have said them in my head every night for eleven years, in the order the beds go, from the door. "That is the room."
"Rosalie."
"And Rose," I say. "Rose is the first bed. Rose has been the first bed since I was seven."
I tell him all of it.
It takes about forty minutes and he does not interrupt once, and the only thing he does in the entire forty minutes is at one point move his hand across the middle line and put it palm up on the sheet, about four inches over the tape, and leave it there.
He does not reach.
He puts it down and steps back, which is what he does, and I look at it in the dark for a long time and I do not take it.
I tell him about Tuesdays.
Tuesday is the photograph. Every Tuesday, at some point in the day, a photograph goes out to every asset who is in the field, and it is a photograph of somebody in that room asleep, and there is never a message with it, and it has been happening every Tuesday for as long as I have been working.
Nine years of Tuesdays.
I tell him it is not a threat, and that it took me four years to understand why, and that the reason it is not a threat is that a threat is a thing you can bargain with.
This is not a threat. This is an inventory.
It is a man saying: here is the stock, it is all present and correct, we are simply confirming that you know where it is kept.
I tell him that if a file does not close, it comes off somebody else's ledger, and that I have never seen what that means, and that I have heard it twice through a plasterboard wall.
I tell him that Wren has a deviated septum and sleeps with her mouth open.
Somewhere in the middle of it he says one word, which is "How", and I stop.
"How what."
"How does a person get in."
"You do not get in."
"Somebody gets in. There is a lorry. There is a laundry. There is a man who reads the meter." His voice has not changed at all. "Nothing on this earth is sealed, Rosalie, I have spent nine years finding the gap in things that were built by people who were paid to close it."
"There is a gate and there is a lane and the lane is a mile and a half long and it is open ground on both sides. There is nothing to walk in behind. There is one road and it is the only road and you can see a car on it for four minutes before it arrives."
"Four minutes."
"Yes."
"That is not nothing."
"It is nine years of nothing," I say. "I have run it. I ran it when I was twenty two and I ran it again when Wren came and I have run it about eleven times since, in my head, in the dark, and it does not work, and I am the best they have ever had, and I have never got past the four minutes."
He is quiet.
"Say the rest of it," he says.
"There is no rest of it."
"There is. You have run it eleven times and you have stopped at the four minutes every time, and the four minutes is not the problem, and you know it is not, and you have not said the actual problem out loud yet tonight."
I lie in the dark with my jaw shut.
"They are not locked in," I say.
"Say it properly."
"There is no lock on the dormitory," I say. "There has never been a lock on the dormitory. The door at the end of the propagation wing has a handle on the inside and it opens onto a lane and the lane goes to a road. Nine girls, one handle, no lock, for nineteen years."
Silence from the other side of the tape.
"So it is not four minutes," I say. "It has never been four minutes.
It is that if I take them out through that door, whichever ones I do not reach are still in the room in the morning, and Hanno does not have to do anything at all, he only has to let it be known which beds are empty and which are not. "
Nothing.
"That is the wall," I say. "It is not glass and it is not a gate. It is nine of them and one of me and no way on this earth to move nine people two hours down a road at the same speed."
At the end of it there is a very long silence.
"Which one is yours?" he says.
And that is the question. That is the only question there is in the whole of it and he has waited forty minutes and asked exactly one, and I lie in the dark with my back against a strip of tape and I cannot make the word come out.
I try twice.
"Wisteria," I say.
"That is the intake name."
"Yes."
"What do you call her?"
The room is completely dark and there is a man four feet away with his hand palm up on the sheet and outside the window the river is going out and somewhere below us the lift starts and stops.
"Wren," I say.
And then it happens, and I have no warning of it at all.
It is not crying. I want to be exact. There is a thing that happens in my chest like a door coming off its hinges and my whole body goes rigid with it and there is no water and no sound, none, and it goes on for about eleven seconds and I cannot breathe through any of it.
Nineteen years.
Four years since she arrived, and I have said that name out loud perhaps forty times, always to her, never to anybody else, because there was nobody else, because there has never once in my life been anybody else in the room.
His hand is still on the sheet.
I put mine in it.
He does not close his fingers straight away.
That is the thing I think about afterwards, more than anything else in the whole night. He waits about a second and a half, and I feel him decide, and then his hand closes over mine and does not do anything else.
Nobody says anything for a while.
"Do not," I say, eventually.
"I have not."
"You are going to."
"I am going to try to do something about it, yes," he says, into the dark, in exactly the ordinary voice he uses about cranes.
"Not tonight. Not this week. And I am not going to promise you anything, because I have watched you take a promise about four times now and you cannot hold them, they go straight through you.
" His thumb moves once across the back of my hand and stops.
"So I am not going to promise. I am going to go downstairs in the morning and start, and you will find out that I have started when you notice it. "
"That is worse."
"Yes," he says. "It is much worse. I have thought about that too."
I do not sleep.
I lie in the dark for hours with my hand in his and my back against the tape, and somewhere around four he goes under, all at once, the way he does, and his grip does not loosen.
I have given him the whole thing.
That is what I have done tonight, and I am a professional, and I want to write the report properly.
I have handed the man I am contracted to kill the exact and complete mechanism by which I can be controlled. Nine names. The room they are in. The wall you can hear through. The Tuesday photographs. Which bed. Which girl.
If he is anything other than what he has been for fifteen days, he now owns me completely and there is no version of it I get out of.
I know that.
I did it anyway, and not because I trust him.
I did it because I have carried it for eleven years and there was nowhere to put it down, and tonight somebody put a hand palm up on a sheet and left it there and did not reach, and I found out what I would do about it.