He sounds entirely too cheerful for both his suit and the circumstances, but I nod, follow his instructions. As soon as he puts the cotton bud into my mouth, I have an urge to bite down on it hard, clamp my mouth shut.
‘We may need to take a blood specimen from you at a later time,’ he says once he’s withdrawn the bud and slid it back inside the test tube.
I’m shivering, I realise. I’m not sure when that started, but I don’t seem able to stop.
‘Here, Catriona, sit back down,’ Rafiq says, and her voice is no longer hard, but soft enough to make me want to cry. But I won’t.
When we hear Ross and Shona coming back down the stairs, Rafiq looks relieved, buttons up her jacket.
‘A DNA analysis can take anything between twenty-four and seventy-two hours,’ she says. ‘But obviously, we’ll put a rush on this, okay?’
I nod. Ross nods too, while leaning heavily on the lowboy he fucked me against less than a week ago. I close my eyes, and when I finally manage to open them, Rafiq is giving me that hard probing look again.
‘Try not to worry,’ she says. ‘Either way, it’ll all be over soon.’
*
After I close the door behind them, I stay in the hallway for a long time, standing inside that silver spear of sun from the fanlight window.
We’re in this together, okay? Ross whispers in my ear. But, of course, when I whirl around to the hallway, he’s not there. It’s just another ghost.
CHAPTER 17
Time is so thick and slow, it’s like I can feel it. Like I could reach down and push my hands inside it, watch it drain through my fingers. Ross and I move listlessly from room to room. We stay close together. Whenever we stop or sit, we touch knees or arms or fingers, and I can’t bring myself to care about all the reasons why we shouldn’t. He shakes; tremors rattle down through him and into me. We’re sitting at the kitchen table when he finally lifts up his head. I realise that he’s as angry as he is afraid.
‘I don’t want El to be dead, Cat.’
‘I know,’ I whisper.
‘I never wanted her to be dead.’
And I don’t know if he means because of us, because of how quickly we’ve turned back towards each other, or because of how strong his grief has always seemed from the start, how certain. I reach for his fingers, weave mine between them. ‘I know, Ross.’
Eventually, I have to be alone. I lock myself in the bathroom, blink at the face in the mirror, its eyes tired and just as afraid. I think of the last time I looked at this face and it wasn’t a reflection. New Year’s Day, 2006. Six months after El’s I win. Six months before we would no longer be teenagers any more. We met at Yellowcraigs. It was two buses and a mile-long walk from my house share in Niddrie. I had no idea where El had come from; didn’t even know if she was still living in the city.
The beach was empty, the waves wild, wind vicious, the day sunny and cold. It was hard to look at her for long. I missed her and Ross so badly it was an angry, wretched ache; a stump that itched and tingled and couldn’t forget what it felt like to be whole. She wouldn’t let him talk to me, although he did and often, phoning me whenever he could – even if both of us could see that it was pointless, more painful than silence. I couldn’t bear to hear about her, about them, about plans that didn’t include me. I couldn’t bear to hear his sadness, his guilt, his pleas for me to understand why. Why it had to be this way.
‘You’ve lost too much weight.’
I couldn’t sleep. I saw too many doctors and took too many pills. I’d even flirted with the idea of suicide, and the only thing to stop me was the thought of how ridiculous I’d look if I failed, how pathetic. That then there would be nothing at all of mine that hadn’t first belonged to El.
I kept looking at her in small snatches. Her skin was bright and her hair blonder. Her nails were red and long. I wondered when she’d stopped biting them.
‘You need to eat.’
I saw her glancing down at my ragged nails, the scabbed-over scratches and cuts on my hands that so often appeared without me knowing why or when. I flinched when she reached with her right hand to take my left. I looked back across the choppy waves, out towards the hazy dark line of the North Sea, and I swallowed, suddenly afraid.
‘We’re getting married,’ she said, and I kept on looking at the spindrift, the blinding flashes of sun. I could feel my hand tightening on hers, but she didn’t wince, she didn’t let go.
‘You don’t even want him. I know you don’t. You’re only taking him because I want him. Because I love him.’
It was the first time I’d said it, I realised. To anyone but myself.
El turned to me then. ‘You’re like a fucking puppy, you know that, Cat? The worse someone treats you, the more you try, the more you want them to like you. It’s pathetic.’
I blinked away the sting in my eyes. ‘I’ll leave. I’ll go to America.’ The college was running an all-expenses-paid internship programme at the Los Angeles Times. There was already a list of volunteers a mile long. Before that day, I hadn’t considered going even for a minute.
She looked briefly surprised, maybe even shocked, and then she looked away. ‘Good.’
My fear, my hurt, I swallowed down with anger. ‘I’ll never come back.’
She turned to face me and her smile was wide. I wanted to shrink from the victory in that smile as
