“Okay okay okay,” she said, turning her back on the cooker to make shushing motions at me with her hands.
And then, as I went quiet, she looked me in the eye. “Oh god. Maybe it’s time. Are we doing this, Victoria?”
“Doing what?”
The question was so strange, it brought me right back to her. Curiosity quickly cooled the heat in my chest and I felt sorry at once. Ashamed of myself.
“It’s been, what, six months?”
“Since we met?” I nodded.
“Can we let it go now?” she asked. “The Deb thing? It’s getting old. I think it’s played out. Don’t you think so?”
“What’s played out?” I could hear fast breathing in front of my face. In my nose. Cooling me. Dangerously cold.
“Okay, babe. It’s okay. I know there was never anyone called Deborah Orton at your college. I know you wanted to have a reason to see me again, after that first night. It’s okay. I knew the whole time. I checked right away whether there might be anything in what you were saying and it really didn’t look like it. I thought you’d drop it once we were, uh, seeing each other, so I kind of played along because…well, you know.”
“I really don’t.”
I was pricking all over. Tiny ice flakes, first under my skin. Then the air around me became the flakes.
“And it was fun to go around on those trips and things. But you don’t need to make up a reason to get me to drive you around. I love you and I’ll drive you wherever you want.”
She had never told me that she loved me.
“But we’re not children, Victoria. This isn’t a detective story. I’m not, you know, your police sidekick.” The Cop held out both her hands, palms facing me. It was genuine, a frank gesture. Openness. She meant every word. I just didn’t know what the words could mean.
Then the frozen air flakes clicked together, and trapped me in a translucent box. A barrier between me and the world. Through it, The Cop was looking straight at me, wide-eyed with a new interest, like she’d never really seen me before and didn’t know what she was looking at. As though I were a very strange specimen, dead inside a glass case in the library of some Victorian naturalist.
Or maybe it was that I suddenly felt that way about her.
“No,” I said through the box. “No. This isn’t happening. You mean, all of this wasn’t real? You’re not…real?”
“Oh, come on.” Now it was her turn to be angry. “What the hell is wrong with you? Why do you always have to talk like that?”
As if through a triple-glazed window, I could dimly hear that the soup was bubbling over. The Cop turned away from me to scoop the pan up off the stove. So sensible. So practical. As the brown, glutinous liquid hit the glowing element of the electric hob, it spat and sizzled. The sound of something snapping.
The thing is, when you stop talking people assume you can’t. Then after a while they assume you don’t understand language at all.
But I do. I hear things. Strange things. I hear them at night.
I’m not sure if it’s the nurses.
Chapter Twelve
Some people, when their heart breaks, it breaks open. Not mine.
Once again I shut down all unnecessary functions. I focused for my life. I went to all my lectures, pored over set readings and essay drafts late into the night, impressed my teachers again and again with mindlessly intelligent arguments. Arguments about all sorts of things. Safe things. Theoretical, abstract, vast things. Questions so huge they could not possibly matter, nor have any possible connection to anything that did.
I maintained the very few other responsibilities I had: to pay my College bills, to attend occasional meetings of The Eleven, to appear in my tutor’s office at the beginning and end of each term and tell him things were going fine. I knew, all the time, that I must eventually return to the terrible mystery of Deb’s disappearance, but without The Cop beside me I did not know how. Not then.
My digestion kept deteriorating, and around this time I started routinely getting bad headaches that made it hard to concentrate. I went to see a GP, who said it was “stress.” So I went to see a counsellor. At that time the University was getting in some very hot water, once again, about failing to identify and help its suicidal students, so they’d started really pushing their in-house counselling services at everyone. Big colourful posters all over the JCR noticeboards, and flyers on library tables, asked us constantly if we were Struggling with work? Feeling overwhelmed? The result was that the counselling service was now inundated with new clients and I had to wait four weeks for an assessment. By then, the migraine auras had started.
I knew my mother and grandmother had special headaches. When I was little I had quite a few ordinary headaches, and my aunt had said I “ought to keep an eye on” them, but I hadn’t paid much attention until one morning a piece went missing without warning from the centre of my visual field. It described a shallow arc, replaced with bright, jagged lines like a warship in dazzle camouflage. Do you know the lines of the bridge behind Queens’—the one everyone insists on calling the Mathematical Bridge? Imagine how it might look if you made all its lines jump about as if mildly electrocuted, and if you made them luminous with colours you’d never seen before, yet their appearance was somehow also the absence of colour. You must also recognize this bridge as the harbinger
