rolling around in his head.
He nodded, stroked the gun. The metal was cold. The plastic handle felt brittle, as if it might break under pressure. He was only going to scare her, and this would do the trick. For once, he’d wring some true emotion out of the hard-nosed bitch…
Erik got out of the car, stuffed the gun down the belt of his jeans, and walked across the road to Abby’s house. He was smiling. The sun was still rising. There was nobody out on the street but him. The world felt like it belonged only to Erik, and he could do whatever he wanted without risk of being seen.
He still had a key to the house. Abby didn’t know, but he’d taken a copy before returning the original to her when they’d split up. He didn’t use it often, just a few times a year, to sneak in and rummage around in her underwear drawer while she was out, or to lie on her unmade bed and masturbate. It wasn’t something he was proud of, but it helped to ease his pain.
Glancing around to check that he couldn’t be seen, he took out the key and unlocked the door. He stepped inside the house and shut the door behind him, feeling light-headed. His limbs were floppy but his core was solid, as if a thread of steel rope ran through his centre. His blood ran hot and cold. He didn’t know if he was about to laugh or cry, or even scream.
Slowly, he climbed the stairs and stood outside Abby’s bedroom door. The floorboards groaned quietly under his weight. He could hear a faint chanting noise, but was unsure in which room it originated. He pushed open the bedroom door and looked inside. As usual, the bed was unmade; the sheets were in a state that could only be caused by two people fucking. He wanted to close his eyes but he didn’t. Instead he walked into the room, approached the bed, and sat down. He ran his hands over the mattress. It was still warm. He bent over and smelled the sheets. The aroma of sex filled his nostrils: stale perfume, sweat and semen.
He stood and left the room. He followed the landing to what had once been Tessa’s room. The chanting was coming from behind the closed door. There was a sing-song quality to the chanting, like a nursery rhyme.
“
The voice belonged to Abby. He would have recognised it anywhere.
He reached out and placed the palm of his hand against the door. It was trembling. But, no: his hand was trembling, not the door. He was afraid, but he could not identify the source of that fear.
Erik grabbed the handle, turned it, and opened the door.
Abby was naked and kneeling before a large pile of what he realised must be Tessa’s things — clothes, drawings, toys, photographs: all piled up into a conical mass, like a stunted tower of mourning.
“Abby… what is this? What are you doing?”
Abby ignored him. She acted as if he wasn’t there. She was rocking backwards and forwards, as if she’d lost her mind. Her skin was streaked with dirty sweat, there was mud and leaves in her hair. Her face was smeared with dirt, like primitive camouflage paint.
She continued to chant the rhyme:
“
Erik walked over and grabbed her arm. She was limp, like a sack of flesh without bones. “Abby!” He pulled hard on her arm, turning her around. Her eyes were rolled up into her head: all he could see was the whites. He raised his free hand and slapped her across the face.
She didn’t respond.
He slapped her again, leaving a red mark on her cheek, and then tugged her, dragging her limp body across the carpet towards the door. Still she chanted; she hadn’t even paused for breath. She just kept saying those same words, over and over, a prayer to whatever dark urban gods she thought might be listening.
Erik felt power flood through him. It wasn’t rage, nor was it hatred. This was a purer force, and it came from somewhere outside his body. Like an alien sun shining down on him, the energy warmed his body, cleansing him like a balm.
“This is it,” he whispered. “This is where it all ends.” He tugged the gun out of his belt and clenched his right hand into a fist around the handle. He brought it down, hard, on the top of her head. The sound it made when the base of the grip struck her skull was like a hammer blow. He hit her again, this time with the barrel on the side of the face. He felt her cheekbone crack. Her skin split and blood spattered, splashing the carpet and even the weird tower she’d made at the centre of the room.
Erik was blind. He could see nothing beyond the violence.
He hit her again and again, shredding the skin of her face, shattering the bones of her skull, and yet still she continued to chant those words, through mashed, bloodied lips, and even when her broken teeth began to fall from her mouth.
When Erik stopped she was lying on the floor, curled up like a baby. There was blood everywhere. Still she chanted the rhyme, taunting him.
He was breathing heavily, as if he’d just done a tough workout. His gun hand ached, the knuckles were swollen. He raised his face to the ceiling and let out a wordless wail, an animal sound of pain and self-hatred. Then he returned his attention to the room, and what was in it.
Abby continued to mumble from the floor. She’d stopped chanting and was now trying to speak, but he couldn’t make out the words.
“Look what you’ve done,” said Erik. “This is your fault — you did this. I only wanted to scare you. You’ve made me into something that I despise.” He raised the gun and stared into the barrel. It would be so easy to end it all now: one bullet for her, one for him. Maybe that’s what had been coming all along. Neat and tidy: a smooth little suburban death. He pressed the end of the barrel to his cheek, and then moved it across to his temple. After a second, he pointed the gun at Abby, his finger tightening on the trigger.
“Please…” Her voice was weak. She was speaking through a mouthful of blood and shattered teeth. “Don’t kill me…”
“No, I’m not going to kill you. I love you… all I’ve ever done is love you. Can’t you see? Don’t you understand? I’ve loved you ever since I first met you, and when we lost our baby I would have kept on loving you, but you wouldn’t let me. Instead you went with other men and told me about it. You rubbed my nose in it, like a fucking dog that’s puked up on the carpet.”
“Sorry… hurting… everything hurts.” Her voice was unrecognisable.
For a moment he was acutely aware of the selfishness of his actions, the intensity of his feelings, but then he shoved that insight aside, ignoring it. Why the hell shouldn’t he be selfish? There was no one else to look out for him, to protect his interests. Ever since he was a kid, he’d been forced to look after himself. That made a man hard; it toughened him to the point that nothing could penetrate the armour he had worked so hard to put in place.
“You bitch… look what you did. Look what you did to us. We could’ve been happy. We were a family… a proper family…”
He could no longer bear to look at her, so he raised his eyes and stared across her collapsed body.
Behind her, there was movement. Thin silver branches, leafless and grasping, were slowly emerging from between the gaps in the conical mound of Tessa’s belongings. Like long, thin arms, the branches slid out, swaying in the air; gnarled twig-hands reaching for something that wasn’t there.
Erik tightened his grip on the gun. He approached the mound. The branches appeared to sense him and twitched towards him, turning from silver to brown. He raised the gun and took aim. His hand was shaking so he used the other one to steady the gun, just like he’d seen in the movies.
“No…”
Abby, still on the floor, was speaking to him. He turned around.
“Don’t kill it… our baby… our Tessa… she’s come back…” She spat out blood. There were gaps where a couple of teeth had been.
He swivelled and watched the branches. There were now patches of skin on them, like pale pink bark. As he watched, the patches grew, the skin, spreading like a stain to cover the rest of the branches. The branches became thin arms; the spindly twigs at the ends turned into small hands. Pieces of the construction fell away from Abby’s
