Chapter Fifty-One
JASPER
Claire is allowed to keep her name. She is allowed to keep her hair and her spirits.
Unlike the other girls, she is treated almost as one of the family.
She eats with us. She watches TV with us.
We laugh together at Ali G and Catherine Tate.
She loads the dishwasher after meals and sings along to music on the radio.
She plays the guitar with Jessamine and practices clowning with me.
In many ways she is our first true au pair girl, but of course, we all know that she is not, and I can see the dark shadows under her eyes, the way she flinches, even when she’s smiling, when Daddy goes anywhere near her.
I can see the machinations of her mind, the way her eyes dart around the room, looking, I know, for her way out of here.
And I want her to escape, more than anything I want her to go, because she does not belong here with us. She really, really does not.
I leave doors unlocked deliberately and will her with the force of my consciousness to go to the door, to test the handle, to run.
I make guarded comments to her during the time we spend together about the fact that I would be prepared to help her.
But she is scared, and I am scared. We are all so, so scared all the time and I cannot bear it.
And what is so strange is how quiet the monster is that keeps us trapped in this house.
It smokes cigarettes in an open-collared shirt and cuddles its cat and calls it his best, best girl.
It buys us gifts and tells us we’re beautiful.
It smiles and laughs and looks around its home as if it cannot believe the gifts that it has been given.
This monster calls me “baby boy” and kisses the crown of my head.
This monster makes his wife a cocktail every night and arranges a glacé cherry on a wooden stick as if it were a work of art.
This monster sits in the bosom of its family radiating calm and love.
But it is all an illusion, smoke and mirrors, sleight of hand, like the tricks that I perform when I am being Patch the Clown.
Because however quiet and peaceful we all are, however much we all laugh at Catherine Tate, all of us know, each and every one of us in this blighted, terrible house, that he could kill us in a flash.
And none of us wants to die.
After a while, something changes, and Claire is taken downstairs into Daddy’s study. I don’t see her again for nearly another year, but I hear her. All the time. Just like all the other girls.
And then, at some point, I hear something new: a noise I’ve never heard before, a noise that makes me realize that this has all gone too far, that I have to do something, and then the next day, when the monster is at work and Mummy is at the shops, I take a tiny knife from the very back of a kitchen drawer, one I’m sure nobody will notice is missing, and I tuck it up my sleeve.
Somehow, I think, I will find a way to get it to her.