She doesn’t answer. A small shred of egg dangles from her fork and she brings it to her mouth tentatively.
I can’t keep my eyes off it. I want to see her eat it. I’m possessed, suddenly, by the belief that if she’ll just eat the egg, it’ll be a sign that we’re going to be okay together, the two of us.
In it goes, her lips close around it. I smile. Relief and satisfaction flood through me.
But are her eyes watering?
She semi smiles back at me and gags. The egg lands, with a gobbet of saliva, in the palm of her hand.
What an insult.
I don’t think any of us ever really means to get angry. I mean, whowantsto be that person?
But sometimes it happens.
Sometimes, we might not have even seen our limit coming when we smack hard into it.
Emily peers into Ruth’s bedroom. The curtains are shut. She squints and can make out a lump in the bed. She flicks the light switch, because Ruth deserves to be woken abruptly, but it doesn’t work.
She hobbles across the room and snatches the curtains open, rattling them to exaggerate the sharp metallic jangle of their rings on the pole. She’s angry. Mostly because she felt so scared. She turns, expecting to see Ruth covering her eyes, nursing a tremendous hangover and what Emily hopes is a punishing headache.
But it’s Jayne in the bed. Jayne, who is scrabbling to sit up, her hands on her neck, her mouth open, letting out a rasping gasp, as if waking from a dream of being suffocated. Emily, not expecting it, screams.
Jayne’s chest heaves. She swallows laboriously as if she has something stuck in her throat. There’s panic in her eyes. “What happened?” she asks.
“Fuck!” Emily says. “Don’t do that! You scared me.”
Jayne blinks, confused. Her hands fall from her neck. She feels out of sorts, a form of hangover but she knows that it’s not from drinking. Her heart rate is elevated. With rising dread, she recognizes these as symptoms of a bad night, of a possible episode of disassociation. Fragments of the night before swim in her head and she tries to piece them together.
“Isn’t this Ruth’s room?” Emily asks.
She’s right, Jayne thinks. This is Ruth’s room. Why is she in Ruth’s bed? And, clearly, she hasn’t slept there alone. The covers have been ripped back on the other side of the bed and the sheet is rumpled.
She explores the source of pain in her knee. A cut. Her trousers are ripped. There is a small patch of dried blood on the bedcover. She avoids looking at it, and remembers the entrails, the storm, the broken window as she tried to get back into the barn and her fall to the kitchen floor. But what happened afterward.
“Where’s Ruth?” she says. “What time is it?”
“It’s nearly a quarter to ten and I don’t know where she is,” Emily says and finds she cares that Ruth is missing, but not as much as she cares about reaching Paul. “Can I borrow your phone?”
Jayne is still trying to make sense of the earlier part of the evening. Why is she wearing just a bra and skimpy top but also her walking trousers? “Did you make it down to the farmhouse?” she asks.
“Yes.” Emily isn’t going to go into detail. She’ll only share what Jayne needs to know. “I dropped my phone in a pool of water on the lane, it’s lost, and I can’t remember Paul’s number so I couldn’t call him. I need to borrow your phone. Can I?”
Jayne nods. “I’ll get it.”
Emily watches her get up. She seems sore. And there’s something Emily wants to know. “Why are you in Ruth’s bed?”
Jayne thinks and finds an answer she believes is right, but she’s not sure. “Because she was really drunk. I was afraid she might vomit in her sleep.”
There is more, she knows. It will come to her, she hopes, but she also has a feeling that she might not want it to.
“Perhaps she slept in my bed,” Emily says. She lowers her voice. She has to warn Jayne. “A policeman is here. He’s the farmer’s son. He’s come to see the letter.”
“Why?”
“They need to see what Edie’s done.”
Jayne’s brain is running slow. On the landing she nods at William. “I’ll come down,” she says.
