it’s starting to boil. She scrambles out, slipping like a seal onto the wet floor, pulling herself up, shivering, staring in horrified wonder at curls of steam lifting from the surface of the water.
Eight years ago
Goldie
It was a while before I wanted to kill my stepfather. But after I had the thought, I knew it was only a matter of time. A matter of how. A matter of when.
I discovered he was allergic to nuts by accident. He never told me. I think he saw it as some sort of weakness, a vulnerability, a chink in the armour. It was Ma who let it slip, because of Teddy. I’d come home from school munching a Snickers and offered it to him. She came screaming out of the kitchen, pushing me away, stuffing her fingers into Teddy’s mouth. He started to scream from the shock. Then I was screaming too. When we’d all calmed, she explained why I must never bring nuts into the flat again. “Promise me,” she said. “Not ever.” And I did, immediately. I was terrified of hurting Teddy. “Your stepfather,” Ma added, as an afterthought. “He has it too.”
The idea didn’t occur to me straightaway, I’m ashamed to say. It was so simple. And it was. I only had to be patient, enduring his near nightly visits, until the evening Ma finally went out, abandoning her family for a few pints with her friends, entrusting me with getting my stepfather’s tea and putting Teddy to bed.
I was meticulous in my planning. As meticulous as a ten-year-old, albeit a gifted one, could be. On the way home from school I stopped at the newsagents and bought a packet of salted peanuts and a Snickers. I crumbled the peanuts into the curry Ma had made for tea, adding dried chilli powder to disguise the taste. I watched him eat every bite. I was calm. I felt no remorse, no regret. If it wouldn’t have betrayed me to force his face into the bowl, I would have done that.
Afterwards, I scrubbed the plates, the sink, everything, half a dozen times. He was slumped over on the carpet, having fallen from his chair—sitting on that spot I never touch, now wet with piss. The TV was still on. Tottenham beating Arsenal 3–1. I stuffed the empty peanut packet in my underwear—to be discarded in a bin on the way to school the next morning—and bit off an inch of the Snickers, leaving the rest beside him. I caught sight of Teddy’s wooden rattle, which had rolled under the sofa, and felt a sudden urge to smash it into my stepfather’s face. I wanted to bludgeon every inch of his lazy body, to beat him beyond recognition. Of course, I couldn’t. And even if I had, I wouldn’t have been able to mark him even half as deeply as he’d marked me.
So I clenched my hands into fists, digging my nails into my palms, until the rage ebbed and I started to cry. Then I called Ma. She never understood what’d happened. She kept asking why he’d eat something he was allergic to. It made no sense. The police agreed but, though they interviewed me, they never seemed to suspect me. Ma had a solid alibi. So that was that. And when Ma died, four years later, the question died with her.
31st October
One day . . .
3:13 a.m.—Bea
Bea sits on the bathroom floor in a puddle of her own blood. She’s discovered that the opening of old wounds is far more painful than the opening of new ones. So now she draws the razor along the raw red flesh of cuts made only a few days ago. Pain shoots up her spine, tears roll down her cheeks, as the cuts open again.
With every day that’s passed since Vali’s death, her rage has only been rising. Which accounts for the dreams of black feathers and slaughtered stags. It is rage she must expel, which means inflicting it on herself, lest she embark on a killing rampage across London. She even fears for her mamá sleeping upstairs, since the desire to inflict harm often swells so suddenly, so forcefully, that it’s all Bea can do not to act upon it. The scream builds in her chest like a dreadful wave of nausea but, though her body is desperate to expel it, she manages to swallow it down.
As she draws a finger through the blood on the linoleum floor, Bea understands where this will lead.