She glances up and meets his eyes. He motions for her to go on.
‘“One morning, I swear, she’ll wake up, lift her head off the pillow and – this is the good bit – her hair won’t come with her. She’ll leave it behind like sheared wool around a sheep.”’
Joe is familiar with how Felicity speaks. In the few hours they have spent together, he has absorbed many of the rhythms and inflexions that are peculiar to her. He’d thought that if he heard her read the diary aloud, he would know whether or not she was its author.
‘“No, better than that, I’ll have taken it all away, and she won’t have a clue anything’s wrong until she sees the scissors on the bedroom carpet. She’ll realise then, maybe feel a draft on her neck and she’ll run into the bathroom and – hello, skinhead!”’
Joe has never heard Felicity swear. Her vocabulary is more sophisticated than he is hearing now, but he isn’t sure.
‘You have absolutely no memory of writing this?’ he asks.
She shakes her head.
‘Is the handwriting yours?’
‘Hard to say.’ She meets his eyes and shrugs. ‘I’m – not ambidextrous exactly – but my left hand is quite agile. I can write with it if I have to. This is a bit like when I do that, but I can’t say for certain.’
Joe thinks about this for a second. Handwriting can be analysed. It will be possible to find out for sure if Felicity has written the hostile journal.
‘And there’s more?’ he asks.
‘You want me to read it?’
The act of reading is making her both embarrassed and miserable and he doesn’t want to put her through it again. He reaches out and she hands him the journal. The second entry is even angrier.
6 April
Why the fuck does the bitch have to be vegetarian? We have a fridge that’s always packed with food and never anything to fucking well eat. I don’t buy it, this refusing to eat meat shit. She doesn’t give a fuck about animal welfare, it’s all about Felicity’s non-stop campaign to prove to the world that she’s better than the rest of us.
Oh, I’m Flawless Felicity, I don’t eat animals.
Oh, I’m Faultless Felicity, I’m passionate about animal welfare.
Hello, I’m Fabulous Felicity, and my body is a temple.
Self-righteous bitch.
A feeling of deep unease is stealing over Joe and he is more glad than he could put into words that he has bolted the loft hatch, that she is getting her locks changed. There is only one more entry in the diary.
19 April
The others have been on at me to say something nice about Felicity so, here goes – she’s kind. She found a young bird that couldn’t fly the other day and she was worried that the foxes would get it if she left it outside overnight, so she put it in a box with holes in the lid and put the box in her log store overnight. She even drove to the pet store to find some wild bird food so it wouldn’t starve. She was planning to let it out the next morning if it had recovered enough to fly away.
I waited till she was asleep and then I crept into the courtyard. I opened the log store, and then the box. The bird looked up at me with big black eyes. I think it was on the verge of hopping out of the box when I grabbed it and broke its neck.
I put the box back. She found the bird the next morning. Sentimental bitch actually cried.
Felicity is kind. I’m not.
* * *
‘Have you got to the bit about the bird?’ she asks him.
He looks up. ‘Just finished.’
‘It was a young starling. I thought it died of cold or was too weak. But what if it was me? What if I got up in the night and I broke its neck. What the hell is wrong with me?’
Her face creases into an expression of unbearable pain. She needs to cry, he realises. She needs to let out some of the tension she’s been holding back, but her fists are clenched and she’s biting down hard on her lower lip. And then, with a moan, she drops her face into her hands and begins to sob. After a few moments, he is worried that she will never stop.
He wants nothing more than to cross to her and take her in his arms. No one should have to cry like this and not be