Girl Seven (26 page)

I rested my hand on the backdoor key, hanging out of its lock, and turned it.

There was no bag this time. I hadn’t even brought my gun with the single shot, choosing instead to leave it with Alexei, and it was too dangerous to bring my dagger. Being armed was too conspicuous and likely to be more a hindrance to my believability than a help. I couldn’t let Nic see that I was armed.

He would be on the move by now, maybe watching from outside, but I had no idea when he’d choose to intervene.

I walked back through to the hallway and sat on the bottom stair, away from any windows. Rocking a little, I tried to stay calm and not visualize every way this could go wrong. But there were so many ways. Too many.

‘Fuck,’ I muttered to myself as I heard the back door open. ‘OK, go.’

Standing up, I met the two of them in the hall. Alexei looked distinctly less pleased to be here than Isaak, whom I had never seen so elated.

‘Where is it?’ Isaak asked.

‘Behind the fireplace.’

‘And where are the family?’

‘I’ve tied them up in the bedroom upstairs.’

‘Right.’

Isaak started up the stairs and I took his arm. ‘Wait! The money’s behind the fireplace in there.’

‘I know. We are not just here for the money.’

‘No... Wait!’ I pulled him back again, getting shrill. ‘They’re not even going to see you! I told you, I tied them up, why involve them?’

‘Because we don’t trust you.’ He smiled and pulled his arm out of my grip. ‘This isn’t just about the money. I want to see if you are as loyal as you always say you are.’

‘No, don’t! Come on, they’re just kids!’ I scrambled up the stairs after him. ‘Alexei, look! You’ve got kids, right? You don’t have to – Wait! No!’

Someone fired a shot. I guessed it was Neville because the ceiling above my head chipped and I started down the stairs just as Isaak began yelling. Alexei grabbed me by the back of the neck and screamed at me, ‘What did you do? What the fuck did you do?’

‘He fucking shot me! He... Fuck!’

Isaak was running down the stairs when Neville shot him in the back and his chest exploded outwards towards us. His body flopped down on to the banister and juddered the rest of the way down, with his head at an awkward angle and twitching.

Alexei dragged me into the living room, gun out, close to my head.

Neville shouted, ‘Get out here, you fucking coward!’

I looked towards the barrel held against my eye and almost threw up.

‘You fucking bitch! You
fucking
bitch!’

I was facing the window, waiting to see Neville appear in the doorway. If Alexei didn’t shoot me then Neville would, by accident. And where the fuck was Nic?

There was silence outside the room.

Muffled noises of skin scraping carpet, of Isaak slowly dying.

‘Come in here or I shoot her!’ Alexei snapped. ‘I blow her fucking brains out!’

Silence.

Neville said, ‘OK. OK.’

‘Put your gun down where I see... where I can see!’ Alexei pulled me backwards, and I could feel his heart pounding against my spine.

Neville dropped his gun to the floor where we could both see it.

Alexei glared at it for a while, breathing into my ear through his teeth. ‘OK. Now you come.’

‘Promise you won’t hurt my family!’

‘If you do not come, I kill your whole family!’

I wondered if it hurt to be shot in the head. Was it how it looked in the movies? Instantaneous? Did you feel any pain as it went in? Even for a second, before it hit whatever nerves or cluster of blood vessels were responsible for making you register that kind of thing? Or did you linger, watching out of a useless skull for a few minutes before you went?

Neville appeared in the doorway, hands first, hands in the air.

‘Move!’ Alexei gestured to his right.

Neville took a few steps to his left. He didn’t look scared.

Alexei laughed and pushed me towards Neville.

I turned and froze, waited.

‘Now, I kill you!’ Alexei said, waiting for a moment as if to let the statement sink into me.

Neville hadn’t looked scared...

There was a shot, silenced and muffled. Alexei crumpled to the ground clutching his ankle. The gun fell from his hand and I kicked it away instead of picking it up but it didn’t matter because I looked to my left and Nic was standing in the living-room doorway with his gun trained on Alexei.

‘Fuck! Fuck! FUUUUCK!’

There was blood on Alexei’s hands, which I realized was pulsing from his ankle. He writhed, curled into a ball, cursed, spat, started screaming in Russian...

Neville ducked past the both of us and tore back up the stairs towards his family, glancing at me with barely concealed rage.

Nic was standing there looking at me, waiting for some kind of reaction and suddenly I remembered what I had to do.

Without exerting much effort, I burst into tears.

‘I’m sorry, I... I’m sorry, I just had to... I had to warn them!’ I hid my face in my hands, keeling over slightly. ‘I’m sorry... I’m sorry!’

‘Hey, it’s fine.’ Nic reached out to me with one hand and touched my shoulder, while keeping the gun on Alexei. ‘It’s OK.’

‘I’m sorry, I didn’t mean for this! I... I’m sorry.’

‘I know, it’s OK.’

Looking up at Alexei through my hands, I saw that he had started laughing. He was still holding his ankle, but now he was laughing up at the ceiling, manically, as if he no longer knew we were there.

Nic took his hand off my shoulder and stood over him. ‘Who are you working for then?’

Alexei just continued laughing.

‘Who are you working for?’ Nic asked again.

Alexei didn’t stop laughing, but he looked past Nic straight at me.

I thought for a second that he was going to say something, but he didn’t.

He fumbled for the gun that he had strapped under a trouser leg and Nic shot him again through the side of the face. It fell out of his palm when he flattened to the red-spattered carpet in a collage of his own brain tissue. It was my gun with one shot that I’d left with him in the car.

Nic shook his head. ‘Who the fuck carries a Derringer any more?’

They were both dead.

I stared at Alexei’s lifeless body.

They were both dead.

It was over.

Nic reached out and tentatively touched my shoulder again. I didn’t expect he was the sort to give out hugs willingly. ‘It’s OK. Really, it’s OK, I know you were only trying to do the right thing. You were only trying to help them. This wasn’t your fault.’

I nodded at him, but he was wrong
.
It was my fault. I’d almost had an entire family killed. I’d killed others. It was no one’s fault but mine. For a moment I wanted to tell him all of it but of course I didn’t, because there wouldn’t be any point now other than to ease my conscience – what little of it remained.

Alexei and Isaak were probably going to end up in an unmarked grave, wherever Nic and Mark hid people once they were dead and had become objects.

I wondered what Alexei’s family would think, whether they would ever know what had happened to him.

Nic picked up the Derringer and put it in his pocket.

‘One for the collection,’ he muttered.

I wanted to ask for it back but I couldn’t, so I watched him take my gun away. On my way out I paused by Isaak’s body at the bottom of the stairs. Looking back, I saw Nic crouched by Alexei, going through his pockets looking for identification or other clues.

While he had his back to me, I swiftly crouched and took my passport out of Isaak’s pocket. With it clutched in my hand like a rosary, I went and sat in Nic’s car and had a panic attack hidden behind my hands.

I was alive. I didn’t die.

I counted to seven.

I’d kissed her before. In fact, we’d kissed a few times, but it never seemed to change anything between us. Things never got awkward.

One thing I never told Mark about, because I hadn’t thought it was relevant at the time and I almost didn’t remember it, was the night I went around to Seiko’s house. I hadn’t planned to. It was late but I hadn’t wanted to stay inside.

On my way to the kitchen for a drink I stopped, listened for a moment and then sat down on the stairs. My parents were talking at the kitchen table again, where they always sat for their big and serious adult conversations. But that wasn’t why I stopped. I wasn’t interested in their conversations. I stopped because I could hear my father crying.

I’d never heard him cry before.

It is one of the deepest forms of betrayal: when you finally witness one of your parents cry. Adults didn’t cry, I believed while growing up. I didn’t even think adults
could
cry. That was why I forced myself to stop crying by the age of thirteen. It was something to grow out of.

Hearing Dad crying, even though I had no idea what it was over, hurt me as much as if he had slapped me round the face.

‘I wish that...’

That was all I heard of what Dad said.

‘I wish that...’

I couldn’t quite hear what my mother was saying, so I turned and made my way back upstairs. Feeling unsafe, I packed an overnight bag and left the house without saying goodbye to either of them.

I was too young to make the connection, but shortly after that we moved to London for the last time.

While walking through Toshima-ku I texted Seiko to let her know that I was on my way. I couldn’t stay at home with that atmosphere creeping through the rooms, knowing that my father was crying downstairs.

The draping overhead cables that criss-crossed above my head looked like spider webs in the glare of the street-lamps.

Seiko let me in and hugged me, as she always insisted on doing even though I detested hugs.

‘Where are your parents?’ I asked, following her through to their TV room where she was watching something with Arnold Schwarzenegger in it.

‘Having dinner with their work friends in Shibuya. They said they would be back after I’d gone to sleep. What’s wrong?’

‘Nothing, it was just... My dad’s really upset about something and it freaked me out a bit.’ I sat down beside her on the hard floor in front of the sofa and chairs.

The house was humid. It was the rainy season but I’d managed to get here without being drenched, an umbrella hanging from the crook of my arm.

‘You think it’s about money?’

‘No,’ I said, too quickly. ‘No. What makes you say that?’

She shrugged.

At fifteen we were too young to know how money worked. To us it was this fantastical thing that had made the parents of kids we knew at school have fights. The father of a boy in the year below us had hung himself last year and everyone said it was over money. There were rumours that it had been written in the note he’d left behind for his wife to find. After that, money had taken on connotations of evil to us. Too much of it or too little of it made people fight and kill themselves. You had to have just the right amount of money or things became bad. At that age I had no concept of the things my older self would do for money.

‘No.’ I crossed my arms. ‘It’s not about money. Definitely not. I’d know.’

‘I don’t think so. Your dad is a good person. My mum says that people who worry too much about money rather than what they can do for others are people who don’t care about anything else. She says they only care about themselves. It’s a failing of character. Or something. I don’t know...’ She put her arm around me and smiled. ‘I’m sure your dad will be fine.’

‘Have you ever seen your parents cry?’

‘My mum once, after my great-grandmother died. Her mum’s mum. But she stopped pretty quickly. She thought it was disrespectful to a person’s life if you sat there and cried about them for too long. I was really young though. I’ve never seen her cry again.’

I laughed. ‘My mum cried for weeks when her mum died. I didn’t mind so much. But you know... in London everyone cries all the time. Not the men, but the women cry all the time. It’s tiring. Isn’t there some better way to express yourself?’

‘Not everyone can be an artist.’

‘I’m not a good artist. Anyone can be a bad artist.’

We watched the movie for a while without saying anything.

I can’t remember who touched whom first. We were already touching anyway. Whoever escalated things was irrelevant, because it happened every time. All I remember clearly is my forehead being close to hers, touching hers, and I could see flecks of mascara caught in her eyelashes and the brilliant smudged yellow and green eyeshadow. When I was kissing her I felt nothing outside of me, nothing around us. Just her.

‘Kiki,’ she said, faces still touching. ‘Have you ever done it with a girl?’

I couldn’t lie. I had, once before. About a year ago when I’d been too scared to so much as brush skin with Seiko, another girl I didn’t know as well, Chiaki, had taught me some things when she’d caught me watching her a little too often. She had pink bits in her hair and was a year older than me and I’d thought she was so cool. It had been easier to learn with someone I cared about less. I looked at it in an almost clinical fashion at the time. These were things that I had to learn in order to be good enough when it came to doing it for real, in a way that meant something.

Chiaki had a boyfriend. I think he probably knew.

I nodded, in answer to Seiko’s question, but then I panicked. Would she view it as some kind of betrayal?

But I needn’t have worried. She just smiled at me and said, ‘I haven’t.’

‘It’s easy, I think.’ I snorted with nervous laughter. ‘Easier than boys.’

We were kissing again. I held her face. She gripped my hair. I moved my thumb back and forth and round her nipple until it hardened and she made a tiny whimper against me. Breathing heavily, she took both of my hands and pushed me back and down until the back of my head lay upon the ground and she was holding me down with a strength and a need I hadn’t expected of her.