‘Wake up,’ Anna says, ‘wake up, damn it. Talk to me.’ She reaches forward and puts her hand on the woman’s shoulder, shaking her, gently at first. Nothing. She shakes her harder, determined now.
No response at all. The frustration in Anna begins to subside, a sense of foreboding rising. She takes a deep breath, aware now of a metallic, sweet tang in the air. Bracing herself against the side of the bunk, she firmly grips the woman’s left shoulder, holding it with all the strength she can muster. She pulls up slowly, steadily, and the woman begins to move. She’s not heavy, Anna realises, more inert. A dead weight.
Finally, Anna gets enough traction to pull the woman completely over on to her back. But as she does so, there’s a sickening thud. The woman’s head flops over to the other side of the bunk, beams of sunlight shining straight into the lifeless face. It lolls back at an awkward angle to reveal a gaping wound across the throat, a cut inflicted with absolute intention.
Anna drops her grasp and reels back, a sour taste rising into the back of her throat. She recoils to the other side of the cell, as far away as she can in that tiny space.
The stranger’s face is sheet white, the lips pale. There’s blood everywhere around her, soaked into the sheet and the pillow. Anna takes in a deep breath and steels herself, edging closer to try and assess the damage. Curly hair swirls out dark against the stranger’s blanched skin, spreading out over and under her neck and shoulders, matted and sticky.
She looks down the woman’s body to see the grey tracksuit, bloodstained and dirty. A delicate hand protrudes from a blood-soaked cuff, the wrist bird-thin. Compelled by some instinct she can’t name, Anna touches the cold hand, picks it up in hers. As she moves it, there’s a clink as something metal falls from the dead fingers to the floor – a loose razor blade, its edges stained. Something else the woman must have smuggled in with her.
Anna looks again at the hand in hers; the hand of someone young, the skin soft, uncalloused. The nails are short and bitten. A breath catches in Anna’s throat. She turns the hand over to see deep cuts up the wrist, inches long, vertical, each one clearly made with a fixed intention. The sodden sweatshirt sticks to Anna’s hand – she places the dead arm back down with as much control as she can muster, fighting the urge to scream.
She steels herself, moving closer still, holding her breath, trying to keep out the stench of blood. She touches the side of the woman’s face, pulls her fingers away and brings them up to her own cheek, rubbing along the solid breadth of it, tracing the curve of her brows.
She can’t hold her breath anymore. Though she inhales as lightly as possible, the smell hits the back of her throat and she retches again, desperate to spit it out. Iron, sweat.
She thinks back to the conversation she overheard last night, the horror in the woman’s voice, the pain. Anna knows about desperation. But to cut her own throat? However dark Anna’s feelings have become, however devoid of hope she is, she doubts she could do it. A gentler way, yes, but nothing as brutal as this.
She leans back on her heels, light-headed suddenly. Her hand moves to her cheek, still as cold as if she were lying on that stone floor. She’d woken there in the middle of the night. She didn’t remember how she got there. Maybe there’s more she doesn’t remember.
She stretches her hand out in front of her, the other too, turning them over.Who would have thought the old man to have so much blood in him?leaps unbidden into her mind. She’s barely touched the woman’s body, but her hands are coated, dark red encrusted under her nails and splashed up to her wrists.
Did Anna do it? Did she take that razor blade and slash her up like this? She’s walked in her sleep before. The pill . . .
She sits back on her heels, tries to survey the scene dispassionately, gulping down the escalating fear that she might have been responsible. Itcouldhave been a suicide. But the grimness of it is sinking in, the sheer horror – a diorama of death, a horror movie in real time. The blood spatters, the splashes of it up the grubby wall beside the bunk, the mattress sodden.
Anna leans against the wall opposite the bunk, her eyes closed, fighting for memory. What happened on that call?
But the more she thinks about it, the less sure she is what the woman even said to the person on the other end of the phone. It’s misty, murky, the edges blurred, words slipping through her mind like smoke. It might have all been part of her twisted nightmare, the one that drove her out of her bunk. Could it have driven her even further? To kill?
If she walked in now, to see herself sitting covered in blood like this, Anna would have no doubt that she’d done it. The woman is so slight, Anna could easily have overpowered her, slit her throat.
Anna brings her knees up to her chest, bends her head down to meet them. Today was supposed to bring relief, at last. Now it looks as if everything she’s gone through these past few years, the immense pain she’s inflicted on others, all of this was just a pale rehearsal for what’s about to come.
She was going to go to the sea, hear the waves, taste the salt on her lips for one last time. But Anna doesn’t deserve that. She doesn’t deserve anything, now. An eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth. She turns to the wall behind her, hits her head against it, wincing at the impact.
Again, and again, and again.
OUTSIDE
Where does it start? Like all the best stories, at the beginning.
I see you, you see me, our eyes meet.
You don’t need to speak, you don’t need to smile, you don’t need to say a thing. I know what you’re thinking.
Across the lecture theatre, across the seminar room, in the tutorial. I always know what you’re thinking. You’re thinking about slipping your fingers up my top, caressing my skin, unbuttoning my shirt, pulling it gently off my shoulders, kissing my neck, your kisses trailing further and further down.
I’m thinking about it too.
Oh professor, you make a girl blush.
5
Anna can’t keep it up for long. Fucking hell, she’s pathetic. She can’t stand even the smallest amount of pain.
It’s brought her back to her senses, though.
