Pig Island (32 page)

“I’ll come home. We’ll talk—‘

“I
said
, do you love me?”

I took a deep breath. In the distance a car pulled on to the road and headed towards me. I stared at it, just a dot, my eyes aching.

“It’s an easy question. Not quantum physics, Joe. Do you love me, do you fancy me, do you still want to fuck me, the woman who has stuck by you for years and fucking years while you piss away your degree up a wall, or do you want to fuck some ugly shitty little shitty little
bitch cow
?” She broke off, breathing hard. I could almost smell her bitter breath down the phone. “Do you know what’s wrong with her, Joe?
Do you
? Have you got any idea, or are you just content to leave it to me—the one who’s actually
bothered
to get herself some kind of medical training?”

I stared blankly at the road, a tightness straddling my windpipe. I wanted to sort it in my head, find a response, something to say. But I couldn’t. Just couldn’t get my head to work.

“She’s a
freak of nature
and
if you fancy her
you are a pervert—and you should be put out of your misery, you fucking horrible,
horrible freak
—‘

“Lex, listen—‘

“I’m going upstairs
now
and I’m going to tell her that she
DISGUSTS YOU. YOU
get it? And then, when you come back, you’re going to go into her room and tell her that
SHE DISGUSTS YOU.
You’re going to tell her you don’t
fuck freaks
.”

She broke down into a series of staccato sobs, her breath hitching and catching. The car drew nearer, the grey sky reflected milkily on its windscreen. My hand was stony on the steering-wheel. Grey. There was a long time while I listened to her sniffle and get herself under control.

“You’re not saying anything,” she muttered, after a while. “You’ve gone quiet.”

“When I get home we’ll sit down and talk about this.”

“No,
fuck you
, Joe. I’m not sitting down with you and—‘

“Fuck you, Lexie.”

She took a furious breath, gobsmacked that I’d answered her back. ‘
Don’t you dare talk to me like that. Don’t you d
—’

“What? You get to talk to me like that but I can’t do the same?”

“I’m not the fucking
adulterer
in this relationship,” she screamed. “Being
cheated
on gives me some rights.”

“I
haven’t
cheated on you.”

“But you want to.
Don’t you? Don’t you
?”

I didn’t answer. I thumbed the cancel-call button, switched off the phone, dropped it in my lap and put my elbows on the steering-wheel, resting my chin on them. I sat there for a long time, moving my chin back and forward so that the skin wrinkled and stretched, wrinkled and stretched, watching the car draw near and slow to a crawl to pass me: it was a 2.4 family in an SUV, two stocky, buzz-cut kids in the back, battering each other with helium Nemo balloons. Not Dove. Not him at all.

Lexie
Chapter 1

After the phone call to Oakesy I was shaking so hard my teeth were chattering: actually banging against each other. I’d given him every chance—every chance—to weasel out of it. But he didn’t. He just went back to that awful guilty silence. I got up and stood at the bottom of the stairs, breathing in and out, trying to stop crying, knowing I was about to do something I’d regret the rest of my life.

Going up to her room was an effort. Every step I wanted to cry. But I wasn’t going to let
her
know that, of course. I stood on the landing outside her door and pushed the tears off my face, taking a deep breath, pulling myself up as straight as I could. I didn’t knock—why should I?—I just pushed the door open and stood there, tall and straight, in the doorway. The curtains were closed and the bedside light was on. She was sitting on the bed with her back to the wall, looking at me in surprise, defensive and wary. Her legs were curled up under her, hidden in a mishmash skirt with grubby-looking patches of Indian silk, Paisley and suede all sewn together. My heart beat really hard when I thought about what was under that skirt. What
I
knew that
she
didn’t…

A small pelvic girdle with free extremity, adipose tissue, muscles and a rudimentary bowel sac
…
That’s what I’ll be telling Mr Spitz—

“Angeline,” I said. “I’m going to tell you something.”

“T-tell me something?”

“Yes. Now, take off your clothes. Put them on the floor, then stand in front of the bed and I’ll tell you something.”

She stared at me uncomprehendingly.

“I said, take off your clothes.”

“No,” she said faintly. “No.”

‘
Yes
!“ I licked my lips. ”Yes, Angeline, you will because—because
I
know what’s wrong with you. I’ve been talking to Dr Picot.“

She stopped shaking her head when I said ‘Dr Picot’. Her chin went up and her eyes locked on mine.

“I know what’s made you like you are. I know what’s made you into a …‘ I put my hand on the doorframe, digging my nails into the wood. I knew if I didn’t concentrate very hard I might cry.
Parasitic. Acardiac and anencepbalic—no heart and no head. Parasitic…
’Into a freak. I know why you’re a
freak
. So—‘ God, I had to gulp the air down to stay in control. ”So—now. Take. Off. Your. Clothes.“

She stared at me, a little pulse beating in the side of her neck, every corner of her brain processing what I was saying. An age seemed to go by. Then, just as I was about to say it again, something happened. She seemed suddenly to collect all her courage. She pushed herself off the bed on to her feet so quickly I took an instinctive step back, but she stopped a few inches in front of me, her arms at her sides, trembling like a leaf, and for a moment I just stared at her speechlessly. Then she pulled off her sweater and threw it on the floor.

I blinked very, very slowly, letting my eyes stay closed for a few seconds until my heart calmed down. Then I opened them again. She was wearing a short-sleeved T-shirt; her arms were bare and unexpectedly muscular. She was still looking at me, but her throat was working as if she was trying hard not to be sick or to cry.

“The rest,” I said hoarsely. “Take everything off.”

She pulled off the T-shirt, raising her arms, giving me a flash of underarm hair. She was very thin with small breasts and waist, but her hips were really wide and layered with muscle. She was wearing a greying, lace-trimmed bra that looked as if it had been washed about a hundred times. She unhooked it and let it drop to the ground, showing me her tiny breasts. I had to fight not to lower my eyes.

“And the—the skirt.”

She unzipped it and stepped out of it, kicking it aside. She wasn’t wearing underwear. It was just her legs, thin and a bit scarred round the knees, and her dark pubic hair, but she didn’t try to hide herself. She was looking me right in the eye. The blood raced to my face.

“Turn round,” I whispered. “Turn round and face the bed.”

She didn’t move. We stood there for a long time, holding each other’s eyes, and I had this sense we were teetering on an edge, that this could go either way. Something in my head was screaming for it to stop, stop.

“I said,
turn round
.”

The room was silent. Downstairs the washing-machine went into its final spin and that was the only noise, apart from us both breathing. Then Angeline swallowed. I could hear it, could hear all the ligaments and muscles clicking together.

“Whatever,” she said tightly, tears welling in her eyes. “Whatever you tell me—I’ve thought about it. And I’m not going to have an operation. I’m not ashamed.”

And before I could answer she took a step away from me to the bed and turned and suddenly there it was, all displayed in front of me. I put my hand on the doorframe to steady myself, my eyes wide and fixed. The tail—except I knew it wasn’t a tail—came out of her spine like a giant tree root. It went out backwards a little, then hung down slightly to the side.

A collection of calcifications in the pelvis, a single deformed long bone erupting from the sacrococcygeal region. Parasitic …

Her hands hovered in the region of her back for a second, then she raised them—straight up in the air so there was nothing I couldn’t look at. I could see now, now that I knew, I could see clearly that it wasn’t a tail but a deformed leg.

Parasitic. A parasitic limb …

There was a thick, visible vein that ran along the top of it, down to the swollen tip, which must have been a crude, spade-shaped foot. I pictured what I knew was inside her: half a twin with its mouth open, drinking Angeline’s blood, yawning and hiccuping and baring its bloodied teeth the way a baby does in the womb. I pictured her heart pounding, thinking of it working hard to feed her twin. I wanted to hit her. I wanted to pull at the leg, tear it out of her. It was unthinkable Oakesy could fancy her. With her looking like this … how
anyone
could want to …

I bit down hard on my tongue, a bud of blood welling through my teeth until the urge to hit her went.

‘
Duplicata incomplete
,“ I said, my voice coming out louder than I’d expected. ’
Duplicata incompleta
. Incomplete separation.”

There was a pause. Angeline’s arms seemed to waver a bit, as if they were suddenly heavier. But she raised them up again, trembling with the effort. “I’m not going to have an operation,” she said, in a small, strained voice. “I’m not like this because of anything I did and there’s nothing—‘

“A parasitic twin. No head. No heart.” I paused to let this sink in. “Just that leg and a few vertebrae sticking up inside you.”

She sagged. She made a noise in her throat, then her whole body seemed to convulse. She toppled forward on to the bed, rolling away and trying to gather the limb up to her at the same time. Self-pitying tears ran down her face.

“Don’t cry!” I was the one who should be crying. Not
her
. ‘Stop it. Stop it now.“ I took a few steps forward so I was standing above her, looking down at her body, her scarred legs. ”Stop it!“

But she was sobbing, her forehead hard against her knees, which were pulled up, showing everything down there, everything normal at the front—labia majora with a sprinkling of hair. (Don’t forget I’m a professional—that’s why I can be so pragmatic about it.) Her hands were clasped round the leg, holding it tight against her bottom: it ran straight against her thigh, then hung a little, stiff and scaly, as if it wanted to droop to the bed but couldn’t. I crouched down so I was eye-level with her vulva, smelling its faint peppery odour. When she realized I’d moved she opened her eyes, meeting mine, and tried to sit up, this panicky look on her face. But I didn’t give her time to speak. I got on the bed and pushed at one thigh, pressing it out to the side and putting one knee on it to hold it there. The other I forced down so I could see everything.

“No,” she sobbed, her hands reaching up to me. “Please—‘

But I pushed her hands away. Her vagina gaped a little. I saw a little bit of moisture there, glinting silver at me, and then I saw her smooth reddish perineum leading back, ducking away to a V shape, and behind it the flat slab of the tail, a faint pucker running along it, like the seam that leads down the underside of a scrotum. Then, and I don’t know what made me, but then I inserted two of my fingers into her vagina. She gasped, but I pushed my fingers in deeper, digging them in, the idea flashing through my head that if I only dug deep enough I’d find whatever it was that Oakesy wanted. And if I found it, I’d pull it out of her, and give it to him, wrapped in a bloodied handkerchief.

“Get off. Get off me.”

She grabbed my wrists and tried to twist away, her feet scrabbling on the bed. But I followed her, moving my fingers from her vagina to her anus. I thought of membranes tearing as I pushed my fingers up there, feeling her muscles clamp on me, feeling the smooth insides of her even though she was scrabbling at my wrist, digging her nails in. The twin was in there somewhere—I pictured its face, hands, fingernails, gut, spine, all concertinaed down to a bundle of bone and muscle the size of a foetus inside her pelvis. Maybe I was going to brush against a nose or an ear. Poke my nails into its eyes.

‘Get off me!“

She rolled away and my nails raked along the inside of her as my fingers came out. She let out a long gasp and rolled out of my reach, clamping her hands between her legs. I stood back, sweating and trembling, breathing hard, my head pounding.

“He’s disgusted by you. Do you know that? You make him
sick
.” The tears were rolling down my face. “He said that the first time he saw you he went away and puked. Did you know that?”

“No.” She lay weakly on her side, shivering and crying. “He didn’t say that.”

“Yes.” I looked down at my fingers, splayed out, sticky and shaking. “That’s what he said. Believe me.”

I went woodenly to the bathroom and washed my hands, using hot water and lots of soap, my teeth chattering as if I was freezing. I knew I’d crossed a line. I knew I couldn’t go back. I kept washing and washing and washing until my hands were raw and the urge to cry had left me. Then I went into the bedroom and changed my trousers and blouse. I’ve made up my mind. It’s time to go to London. I haven’t got anything to show Christophe—but if I don’t see him, talk to him, I’m going to go crazy.

Oakesy
Chapter 1

People get lines in their head like a record, grooves they move along when they think they know everything they need to know. They stop trying. With Lexie, I thought I knew her so well I’d stopped thinking about her in the right way. That was why I never expected what I found when I got back to the rape suite that day.