FORTY-EIGHT

Stephanie was surprised that she had still not cried. Maybe the tears would come later, if there was a later.

No, there would be no later, not after what they had just done in the garden. She had seen it and they knew she had seen it. And what she had seen had made her incapable of anything afterwards, except lying on the bed in a foetal position, staring at the wall, back inside her original first floor room.

Such was her shock she wasn’t sure she remembered the events correctly, or even in the right sequence. She could only recall bits of what happened, like clips from a film she’d been watching as she dozed off, and then awoke, and then dozed off again, until she’d finally roused to watch the end credits rolling down a screen. But images from the garden scene would suddenly rush into her mind, and they would be too clear, too loud and too bright, and she would whimper and push the images back into the darkness.

She didn’t know how long she had been lying like this in her old room. Hours, surely.

After Ryan had arrived and Fergal had locked her inside Margaret’s old room, Stephanie had heard raised voices issuing from deeper inside the building. She’d heard them while pressed against the door. The voices had grown in strength and volume and changed tone. She’d wanted to break the window and scream for help. But fear, yes fear, of displeasing the cousins and provoking reprisals she might not awake from, had kept her sobbing and pressed into the door. And fear had become guilt while she repeated a mantra to herself: Ryan must have told someone he was coming. Ryan must have told someone he was coming. Ryan must have told someone he was coming.

Guilt had since sunk into regret. Because now, more than anything, she regretted not breaking the window and jumping from the second storey of the building. She was responsible for what had happened to Ryan. Like Knacker had said, she was responsible because she had told Ryan where she was and ‘bitched to him, like, about this house. No one likes a grass.’

‘Oh, God. No, God, no,’ she said to herself as the most memorable scene flashed into her mind once again; a scene from midway through the proceedings, after she had managed to knock Knacker aside and briefly escape the room. A vivid scene which featured Fergal’s lanky shape dragging something by a foot through the rubbish sacks and building refuse and long weeds of the patio: a body not really moving beside the clutching motions it made upon its own wet and crimson face.

Ryan.

That was before Knacker ran and caught her in the stairwell. He had grabbed her by the hair just after she had raised a hand to bang the stairwell window. He’d taken the wrist of her raised arm with his other hand, and even he had paused at that stage and said, ‘Better not look, eh? When Fergal loses it he don’t fuck around, like.’

Her memory revisited an earlier scene: the one when Knacker came to her room a few minutes after the shouting and bellowing had stopped downstairs. Right after Fergal had screamed like an animal and then bellowed, ‘You want it! You want it! You want it!’ at the visitor, at Ryan.

Knacker’s face, when it appeared at the door of the room in which Margaret had died, was bloodless and wet with sweat and he had been wheezing like an asthmatic. He had run up two flights of stairs to check on her, to make sure she ‘wasn’t trying anything on, like’.

One of Knacker’s hands was red and some of the knuckles were already blue-purple. He’d held one hand against his stomach like a claw and kept wincing as he spoke to her. The big toe of one foot had come through one of the new lime green trainers. The shoe looked like a child had blown scarlet paint through a drinking straw across the top.

And then her memory drifted forwards to the sound of Fergal’s dirty shoe coming down on Ryan’s face on the garden patio, and then stamping onto the side of his head, and then onto his face again, and then onto the back of his head, after Ryan had rolled over and tried to get to his knees.

One of Ryan’s arms had been broken and hung limp under his ribs, which was why he had not been able to get up from the dirty ground. They had broken his arm inside the house before they dragged him into the garden. They had disabled him first.

The sounds then issuing from the patio, under Fergal’s stamping shoe, had been a whumf, whumf, whumf. The following sound, the final noise, had reminded Stephanie of a chamois leather being slapped onto the windscreen of a car. It was the last thing she had heard before Knacker yanked her onto her back and then dragged her up the stairs and marched her down the corridor to her old room.

‘I got the bottle. You wanna see it? Eh? Eh? Eh?’ Knacker had whispered over Stephanie’s shoulder and into her ear. ‘God help me I will use it too, sister. On my muvver’s life I will frow it in your face, girl. After what you done you is lucky you still got lips round your mouf.’

That is what Knacker had said to her – yes, because he was referring to an earlier scene, when he had first come to her door, panting, with his painful hand and his bony face drained of blood after his exertions with Ryan downstairs. And when she had seen that Knacker was lame – that the hand he’d used against Ryan’s handsome face was injured – she had lashed out and punched Knacker. Smashed her knuckles into his big lips and made him squeal. And while his eyes were full of tears, she had knocked him out of the way and had run to the stairwell, screaming Ryan’s name into the dim, warm claustrophobia of the house’s interior. By the time she’d reached the stairwell window Ryan was past help and past hearing her.

The dog had been barking. She remembered the violence in its bark as it wanted to join its masters and shake the inert meat around the broken patio upon which Ryan had been slaughtered. They had murdered Ryan with their fists and feet, like simple apes whose territory had been infringed by a rogue male.

The noises came back to her. Again and again. Whump. Whump. Whump. Slap.

Stephanie turned over on the bed and looked at the window without seeing it.

Not long now.

They’d be coming for her soon. How would they do it?

How will I die?

She looked at the light fitting and briefly thought about hanging herself. But with what? A belt . . . tights . . .

She didn’t know how to tie good knots and knew she wouldn’t be able to step off the end of the bed and into thin air. The very thought brought her close to a faint. Part of her mind seemed to be shouting, I can’t believe you are having these thoughts. But she almost laughed at the sentiment. No, she would carry on breathing until they decided they would stop her heart and end everything that she was: the thoughts, feelings, memories and attachments. Her. Me.

Around her, inside the atmosphere of the house, she sensed the continued descent of a heavier gravity. A blackening of the air. A big, old, deep breath had been pulled into dirty stone lungs lined with vulgar wallpaper. It wasn’t the same house she had been inside even two days ago. This was another time and place now. Hate and sadism had anointed the air in the same way sex had. The cries and footsteps of long lost women had been the chorus at the beginning of the ritual, a polyphony of misery.

The atmosphere had become enriched and built to a critical mass. Yes, she perceived this now, understood how it worked. A terrible unstable energy had grown inside the space once the right components were in place to trigger a reaction. And she was just more fuel, another sacrifice to something that had been here much longer than she had. She didn’t matter, neither did Ryan, or the sobbing girls that were already dead, but were still beaten and raped night after night by something that smelled of human disease. Fergal, Knacker, Bennet: they had won.

Once you came within their reach in the worlds they created, nothing really held them back. Not for long. They changed everything before you noticed, while you were still smiling and trusting and hoping. They had made everything she took for granted redundant, like cooperation and manners and civility and privacy and laws. Silly things that pinged out easily like old light bulbs.

She’d swum through a little bit of the world for a tiny fragment of time until she’d happened across them, and now she was going to be put out like a spark pinched between grubby fingers. When she realized this was how her end would look to most people, she seemed to slip over an edge existing somewhere in the middle of herself. And she wasn’t sure who or what remained behind.