calls down to the front desk to check security are in place, but even though her call is answered immediately, she isn’t reassured. She decides to call it a night.
She locks her car doors the second she is inside, but still her heartbeat increases each time she has to stop at lights or pedestrian crossings.
He’s getting closer.
Outside her house, she sits in her car for some time, watching the rear door of her property. She sees nothing to cause her alarm and so plucks up courage and leaves her car. It is a beautiful summer evening, rich with scent and bird song and she feels a moment of anger that she is too afraid to enjoy it.
There is no one in her courtyard.
She makes for the large kitchen window, intending to peer inside and see if the triangle of cans is still behind the door but stops, feet away. Someone has been here. Someone has drawn, in black paint, on the glass of her kitchen window. A simple, cartoon-style drawing. Two large upright ovals with a single black dot in each. Cartoon eyes. The paint is on the outside of the glass, which is better she supposes, than being on the inside, but the message is as plain as if it had been written in words. Someone is watching her.
38
Shane
It is the silent hour of the night and Shane is walking. He walks swiftly, because the voices are loud inside his head tonight. They remind him about every mean and shameful thing he has ever done, every dirty thought that’s crossed his mind, everyone he’s hurt or thought about hurting. They tell him he is useless, that he will always be useless, and that everyone he meets turns away from him like toxic waste.
He strides down Portugal Street and has to curl both hands into fists to stop himself breaking into a run, because when he runs, the panic and the rage build and the voices rise from incessant whispers to screams in his ears.
Normally, the quiet of the city calms the voices. On most nights when he walks, the gentle sleeping noises the city makes – the distant hum of traffic, the musical chimes of the church clocks, the mew of a cat – lull the voices back to sleep. Nothing is working tonight and they keep on at him, voices that have plagued him for all of his life, and others that he hasn’t heard before. They tell him to cut. They tell him to stop wasting his time making ever more scars on the flesh of his lower back and make one final sweep across his throat. They tell him to cut the flesh of others. They tell him to kill.
He walks on, because the saner, better part of him knows that only the walking and the silence will keep him grounded. He turns into New Park Street and makes for the car park where the homeless hang out. Seeing their sleeping faces can help, but tonight he fears it might not. The voices are telling him to hurt and the homeless lie so quietly and so helplessly. He passes the old woman in the green coat dozing on a bench. Beside her is a shopping trolley that probably contains everything she owns.
A sound startles him. A harsh discordant humming. An image leaps into his head: that of a giant insect. He turns, and the insect is there, coming straight at him, low-flying, huge, humanoid in shape. Shane cries out in horror. His mind has finally parted company with sanity.
The insect is a girl on roller skates. She hurtles towards him, the wheels of her skates screaming over the rough tarmac of the road. At the last moment she swerves, avoiding him, hissing in his face. He catches a glimpse of a face, young but twisted with anger, and then she is gone. She skates like a professional. The bumps and holes in the road make no difference to her. She turns a corner and vanishes from sight.
The voices, shocked into silence by the girl, start up again. They are loud, insistent. Shane pulls his knife out and lifts his sweatshirt. He reaches up and back. The blade makes contact with his skin.
A siren sounds loud through the night and in the reflections of a nearby window, he sees the blue flashing lights. The car is almost on top of him.
Shane drops the knife and flees.
39
Felicity
Felicity is being pinned, face down. She cannot see the burning end