42. Starling
CHAPTER FORTY-TWO
STARLING
There are some serial killers who are able to pace out their murders.
Months can go by, years even, before they strike again.
But most are unable to resist the urge, that itch at their skin, and the time between each victim grows narrower and narrower, and soon enough the killer is either caught or dead themselves because that is the only way they will ever stop.
For the ones that are caught, it is interesting to imagine them stewing away in their prison cells.
That itch, that desire, must only grow stronger, but this time there is no outlet.
I think about my life in this way: before and after the lockdown.
Many people do, though many others prefer to pretend nothing has changed, that things are back to normal.
Never mind those that were lost, the communities that came together, the hope for better treatment of healthcare workers and a renewed interest in keeping each other safe.
Just as the birds retreated into the shadows when humans returned to the outside, our empathy retreated too, and all promises were forgotten.
Seven years on, it is business as usual.
But my life after what happened to us has, I understand now, been an ever-increasing itch, a want to return to the person I was that summer.
I have been itching and itching, and it is only at this moment, the rush of fear and yet excitement at knowing Cassandra is our culprit, that I have finally been able to scratch.
And is that because the pieces are finally coming together, the puzzle of what has been going on is being solved? It’s what a good journalist would enjoy.
Or is it because there is a chance we are going to kill again?
Because that’s what a good serial killer would rather.
And it feels so right to scratch.
We head to Bishop’s House under cover of darkness, just like old times.
It could be any one of those nights, backpacks filled with snacks and alcohol, ready to laugh and chat and dream.
There wasn’t time to change, so we are still in the same clothes we chose for the charity event.
It feels bizarre, overdressed, but there is also a sense of ceremony to it.
These clothes are for special occasions, and this is as special as it gets in the worst possible way.
“What a mess this is,” I say, falling in step with Crow while Cuckoo charges ahead and Wren does her best to keep up with her.
“My whole life is a mess,” Crow says. “I’ve been so busy lately; it’s been going to work and then being with you guys, Chelsea moving out, people needing to be let in to view the flat. I haven’t had a chance to clean in forever.”
The time Cuckoo dropped her tea bag into the garden and it landed perfectly on Chelsea’s head seems forever ago, almost a different lifetime.
“Has anyone else moved in yet?” I ask.
“Not yet. I’m sure someone will be in by next month.”
“Chelsea hasn’t got in touch?”
“No. She said something funny when she left, you know. About all of you.”
“Chelsea did?”
“Yeah. You’re very different when you’re with them, and it’s not in the way you think.”
“What’s that meant to mean?”
“I have no idea.”
We reach the bottom of the hill, and something flies past my head, visible via a streetlamp. It is a bird.
Not just any bird: a goldfinch.
“Fucking hell, Goldie,” I say. “Scare the shit out of me, why don’t you?”
“Goldie?” Crow says. “You see her too?”
Crow sees her?
“She’s always there. In signs. Like why do you have a copy of The Goldfinch? Are you trying to find her?”
Crow blinks. “I don’t know. Maybe. She appears, but she doesn’t talk to me.”
“The real her?”
Crow nods.
“I wish I saw that.”
“I ignore her,” she whispers. “Every time she tries to talk to me. I tell her to go away. What the hell are we going to do, Starling?”
“You know what we’re going to do.”
“I never wanted any of this,” Crow mutters. “I wanted so much more.”
“Me too.”
“And I hate that she’s dead, and that we had to leave her how we did.”
“If she was here, do you think we’d have figured things out?” I say. “With our lives, I mean. Do you think she really would have been a supermodel?”
“I used to have nightmares about Hugo,” Crow whispers.
“At university. I’d wake up with the sheets all thrown off, sometimes half falling off the bed myself.
I pictured him miraculously showing up, somehow surviving what happened, and the police would come banging the door down, and we’d all be caught. ”
She was the one that hesitated the most. Called us feral.
“My life is awful. I work in an office I hate with people I’ve been trying to impress for reasons I can’t think of anymore, my flat is too expensive, and I’m practically drowning in bills and credit card debt.
All I want to do is write, and I’m terrified I can’t, and worst of all I’ve lost whoever the hell I was trying to be. ”
I laugh. “Make that two of us. But isn’t it better, now that we’re together again? Can’t you admit that, however stubborn you are?”
Crow sighs. “If I say yes, does that make me a terrible person?”
“You haven’t lost who you are, Crow,” I tell her. “Look at you. You still want the dream. You still want far bigger things than the rest of us.”
We have reached the top of the hill, and as always I have to take a moment to breathe Bishop’s House in.
It is at its best in the nighttime.
The building has an allure, a twisted appeal, a way of pulling someone within even if they try to fight against it.
I remember Wren, terrified at first to enter, even when she had been there before, and then exhilarated inside.
By the end of that spring and summer, Bishop’s House had transformed her completely. Transformed us all.
Except for Goldie—Goldie was constant. Where the rest of us were morphed by our experiences, she was perennial, unmarred.
Perhaps that is why Bishop’s House had to kill her.