‘What?’
‘You heard me.’
Kate laughs. She tries to haul herself upright once again and this time, she manages it. She bends both her arms to the deadweight of her legs, half pushing, half carrying until they lie at an approximate 90-degree angle to the rest of her. She sits with her back slumped against the wall, exhausted by the effort. Sweat drips from the end of her nose. She wipes it away with the back of her hand and when she draws it away, it is smeared with blood.
‘What … have you … done to me?’ Kate asks.
Marisa raises an eyebrow.
‘Oh, Kate, Kate, Kate. Whatever I’ve done to you pales in comparison to what you’ve done to me.’
‘I don’t know what you mean.’
Kate starts to cry. She hates herself for it.
‘Why am I bleeding?’
‘Don’t worry. You’ll live. It’s just a minor blow to the head.’
She has never seen Marisa like this – cold and distant. Even her language has acquired a medical gloss. Usually Marisa is so chaotic and rumpled and earth-motherly. Kate has always believed her to be a bit hopeless. Strange, yes. Lately, her behaviour has been erratic and worrying. But this –this– is beyond anything she could have imagined.
She looks directly at Marisa, and then down onto her lap where Marisa appears to be holding something in her hands. The hallway is still gloomy, but light is filtering out from an open door further down the corridor. The light reflects weakly from a tiny glimmer between Marisa’s hands and Kate realises it’s a knife. She’s holding a knife.
Panic scrabbles in her chest. She swivels her head, trying to make out an escape route, but there is none. No windows. No way of moving with her legs tied. A warmth seeps into her trousers and she realises she has wet herself. She is still crying, sobbing now, her throat raw. She starts to scream, hoping someone will hear. But she knows the walls in this house are thick. They have never heard any noises from their neighbours. Not once.
The screaming unsettles Marisa.
‘Shush, Kate, shush.’
But Kate carries on because the noise of it reassures her she is still alive. That there is still hope. She screams. No words, just sounds and the more she does it, she realises, the more Marisa becomes agitated.
‘Kate, please stop. Shush, shush, shush, now. You’re OK. You’re fine. It’s OK. I’m not going to hurt you. I promise.’
Marisa shifts forward in her chair, placing the knife carefully onto the floor. Kate registers that it’s a knife from the wooden block in the kitchen, one of the ones that needs sharpening. She used it the other day to slice into a tomato and the knife was so blunt it was difficult to dent the skin. This calms her. Marisa can’t hurt her with this knife. It is for show, nothing more.
‘I just want to talk,’ Marisa says. Her voice is different now, less flat and more fevered. ‘I feel like I’m going mad and I just want to talk.’
You are, Kate wants to say. You are going mad. These are not the actions of a sane person. For months, she’s been worried about Marisa, about the way she barely sleeps or eats, about the way she slinks around the house as if she’s stalking Kate. There was that time, a few weeks ago, that she found Marisa following her in the tube station at Oxford Circus. She was spooked enough to tell Jake about it.
‘It’s like she’s obsessed with you,’ he said, stroking her hair out of her eyes. ‘A girl crush or something.’
But she knew, even then, it wasn’t a harmless crush. It was something darker. It was as if Marisa actually wanted tobeKate, to inhabit her form, to stitch together clothes made of her skin.
‘It can’t be good for the baby, all this,’ she said to Jake. ‘I’m really worried about her. And we both know it’s more important than just her. The baby’s my main concern.’
They had plans, the two of them, for what would happen when the baby arrived. What they would do. How happy they would be once Marisa had left their lives.
‘I know,’ he said. ‘I’ll talk to her.’ And Kate had trusted him to do so. She always had.
13
They had met six years ago. He always joked that she could never remember specifics. It was Jake who recalled anniversaries and Valentine’s Days with small gifts and thoughtful cards referring to long-held private jokes, but she knows they met six years ago because it happened at her thirtieth birthday party. She had, at the time, been working on the publicity for a low-budget independent film directed by one of her friends – it was a favour, really, she wasn’t making any money on it, but she believed in the movie, which was interestingly shot and told a story that needed to be told, about a twelve-year-old girl who was taken into care and sexually abused by one of the counsellors. Kate had persuaded a couple of critics from the broadsheets to come to a screening and they had loved it, and given five-star reviews that made them seem edgy and helped the film expand its distribution to more than a handful of cinemas. Kate’s friend, Ajesh, was now being courted by the bigger studio heads, one of whom had shown interest in developing a script about a teenager who discovers she has been born with no sense of morality. The working title wasBadolescent.
Ajesh came to her thirtieth birthday, which was held in the upstairs room of a Wandsworth pub within walking distance of her flat, and he brought with him a couple of men Kate had never met. This was typical Ajesh. He hadn’t asked if he could come with anyone but he was so likeable that you could never begrudge it. It was how he persuaded people to do things for him.
‘Katie!’ he bellowed from the other side of the room. Ajesh was also the only person allowed to call her Katie. She was drunk on champagne, wearing a tight blue satin dress bought for the occasion from Topshop, and heels that were higher than usual because it was herparty and she was allowed to dress like a slut. She beamed at Ajesh, handsome in a corduroy suit and his familiar tortoiseshell-framed spectacles, and made her way over to him.
‘Happy birthday, darling,’ he said, hugging her. ‘Fuck me. You look fiiiiit.’
