Laine smiled. ‘I was angry. Now I’m sad.’ She flicked on the indicator. ‘Aren’t we a pair?’
The car turned onto Coronation Drive, and their speed picked up.
‘Where am I taking you?’ she asked.
Before he could think why, he answered, ‘The church.’
She nodded, checked her mirrors and changed lanes. As she turned, Nicholas saw a small cut on her cheek.
‘What happened to your face?’ he asked, and guessed: ‘Mrs Boye?’
‘Yes.’
Her tone said the talking, for now, was over.
Outside the church, a group of middle-aged and elderly men and women huddled under umbrellas, hardly moving, heads turning this way and that. To Nicholas they looked like a team of mallard ducks — dignified and vulnerable. Their heads all followed Laine’s car as it slowed and stopped. He would have been unsurprised if they’d sprouted wings and fled, honking forlornly. He wound down his window. ‘Hi. The rectory’s around the side.’
An old man with a long face and wide, hairy nostrils looked down at him. ‘We do know.’
Nicholas shook his head — then why. .?
‘The reverend is dead, and his replacement is in hospital.’
‘Who?’ asked Nicholas. ‘Pritam? Reverend Anand’s in hospital?’
An old woman with sagging wattles looked at him as if he were a fool. ‘Do you know any other replacement? We’re discussing what to do.’
Nicholas looked at Laine.
At that moment, Laine’s grey eyes rolled back in her head and she sank into her seat.
25
Hannah Gerlic sat in her beanbag stroking Swizzle. The cat’s girth was growing in direct proportion to his unwillingness to go outside. Hannah liked his warmth on her lap. If she thought about nothing but the immediate task of scratching behind Swizzle’s ears and keeping the rumbly motor inside him purring, things were okay.
Her bottom hurt where her father had hit her for lying. Just thinking of how his face had been a twisted fist at once so angry and terrified made her want to start crying all over again.
She had been dragged up from the depths of ugly sleep by motion, sliding. She’d opened her eyes and looked right up into the pale, angry, scared face of her father — a man whose soft features were usually buried in a book or newspaper or smiling over his wife’s shoulder while they danced in their pyjamas — a sight that made their daughters roll their eyes. This morning her father took a moment to process the empty bed, the picture frame on the floor, his youngest daughter blinking sleepily on it, before whispering, ‘Where’s your sister?’ The memory of the spiders tumbled back as heavily and hard as stones off a tip truck, and Hannah started to bawl. Her father asked her again and again until Hannah finally stuttered through sobs, ‘The spiders took her.’
Before she could explain that she’d had no choice, that if she’d let them in she’d be dead too, or if she’d screamed he and Mum would be, her father smacked her. Hard. And stalked out of the room.
Hannah hung around in a distant orbit as her parents set fire to the morning with raging phone calls, storming to the car and screeching away, storming back, standing at the door and yelling for Miriam. The fire died and became something quiet and tight-lipped. When Hannah heard her name mentioned, it was quickly snapped up by her father hissing something about ‘ridiculous dreams’.
It
Miriam was dead. Hannah searched inside herself for the smallest feeling that disagreed, but found none. Miriam was gone. And if it hadn’t been Miriam, it would have been her. The fact that she was so relieved not to have been taken by the spiders and cocooned up alive and screaming to be bitten and poisoned and sucked dry or whatever else spiders did made her feel guilty and even glummer. Something had tried to get her yesterday, leaving the horrible dead bird disguised as a crystal unicorn. It had failed, and instead had taken Miriam to the woods.
As Hannah sat, her lap warmed by Swizzle and her buttocks by the hot sting of a hard slap, surrounded by a buzz of men and women in blue and her parents clenching each other’s hands, she realised what she had to do.
She couldn’t bring Miriam back. But she could kill whatever had taken her.
26
Nicholas sat on the toilet. He thought if he could sit there long enough, he could get back enough composure to find his way out. Then his stomach heaved again. He rolled onto his knees just in time and a thin stream of amber bile gushed into the bowl. He gripped the stainless-steel rail beside the pedestal as he vomited.
‘Fuck it,’ he whispered.
Time to go out.
He didn’t want to go. It was horrible. But he knew he had to.
He got to his feet, wiped his mouth with some paper towel, and unlocked the toilet door.
Dead floated by like bodies on the sea after a tsunami. They rolled by on invisible gurneys, some thrashing wildly, some almost motionless; some choked silently, arched like fragile bridges, some sobbed with pain. They rolled to and fro between the curtained bed bays of the Emergency ward.
Nicholas felt his knees threaten to give way.
‘Help you, mate?’ asked a harried male nurse.
‘Lai-’ Nicholas swallowed back a stubborn mouthful of gorge. ‘Laine Boye?’
‘Bed twelve.’
Nicholas nodded thanks. An old woman suddenly lurched in front of him, pulling on catheter lines in her arm that had been binned who knew how many years. She fell gracelessly to the floor, looking up at Nicholas, before unseen hands scooped under her thin shoulders and dragged her into a nearby cubicle, depositing her on a small, shifting sea of overlapping ghosts. In their midst, an unshaved patient chewed thoughtfully as he read a newspaper. Feeling Nicholas’s eyes on him, he peered over the paper’s edge.
‘You right?’
Nicholas nodded stiffly and hurried away.
Laine lay on the trolley bed in bay twelve. A saline drip line snaked into her arm. Monitor leads were attached like lampreys to her upper chest. A red-glowing plastic thing was attached to one long-fingered hand like some electrified leech. About her drifted a fog of overlapping ghostly bodies.
Nicholas fought the electric urge in his legs to flee.
‘Yes, sir?’
A round, black African nurse bowled into the bay, not looking at Nicholas as she quickly grabbed Laine’s chart, scanned it, then went to check the rate on the drip.
‘I brought her in,’ he replied.
‘You her husban’?’
Laine’s face was placid, unmindful of the misty sea of death floating around her. Again, Nicholas was struck by the classical lines of her cheeks, her eyes.
