“All right,” Jo says, a smug smile in her voice. “You’re lucky you’re straight, y’know. It’s all so simple. Girl meets boy. No one has to come out as straight.”
“Sure,” I say bleakly. “Lucky me.”
“I remember,” she chuckles, laying down a baking sheet, “getting off with boys and just desperately trying to like it. I flung myself at them, imagining these great romances, to get away from the fact that I was completely gaybones.”
Oh God. That’s not what Roe has been doing all along, is it?
“What are you trying to say, Jo?”
“What?”
“That I’m just someone’s pretend girlfriend, I suppose.”
“That is not even slightly what I was saying.”
“God, I’m just so sick of it,” I say, my voice suddenly loud and cracked. “I’m sick of being everyone’s third choice.”
“Maeve, you need to calm down and tell me what the hell you’re talking about.”
She tries to meet my eye, but I can’t let her see how shiny they are.
“I’m taking the dog for a walk,” I announce. “Tutu? Where’s Tutu?”
I find him on Pat’s bed, his head buried under a pillow. He’s already had his walk today, and is enjoying his evening ritual of ignoring us all until my dad comes home.
“Come on,” I say, and he trots amiably after me. I fasten his lead and take him out, hoping that Roe will be hanging around the underpass again.
He isn’t.
After a solid twenty minutes of staring at my phone waiting for Roe to text, I start throwing a stick for Tutu. He fetches it dutifully, a bit too old to be excited by the game. I nestle his big blond head between my hands and call him a very good boy, as though I can compliment myself out of my own problem. We got him when I was eight, after my cat Tom died. My imagination wasn’t great then, either. We named the dog Tom Two, which eventually became Tutu.
We were always a cat family before Tutu. There was the other cat, the one that ran away before I was born. I’ve seen pictures of him. A fat black scoundrel who once ruined Christmas by climbing up on the kitchen counter, eating the turkey, and getting explosive diarrhoea on said turkey. I wasn’t there for any of this, of course. But I’ve heard the story so many times I might as well have been.
Tutu is snuffling around in the snow, a little bored of it already. We all are, at this stage.
I throw the stick for Tutu. It ends up in the river, and he barks at it floating on a nest of green algae.
“Oh God, you don’t want me to fish it out for you, do you?”
He barks.
“Fine. I suppose I don’t have the luxury of pissing you off, too.”
I lean on the water’s edge and pluck the stick out. It’s disconcerting how warm it is. Tutu gazes into the water with me, and for a moment, our reflection – him with his puzzled expression, me with my long woolly hair falling over my face – is frightening. I keep gazing, even as Tutu loses interest and wanders away. And then it hits me.
The dog. The hair.
I look like her.
The Housekeeper.
I think about all the things I’ve done today. I lied to Roe. I’ve shown him the ugliest side of myself. I’ve suspected Fiona of trying to steal him away from me, as though he were a piece of property. I’ve yelled at my sister for no reason at all. And why? Because I was scared. Because I was insecure. Because I felt like a girl who no one could possibly love, and I acted like a girl who no one would want to.
What if I didn’t just summon the Housekeeper because I was angry at Lily? What if the Housekeeper was alive inside of me, all the time? What if the nastiest, darkest parts of me fuelled the Housekeeper?
What if the Housekeeper is me?
The concept comes into view like the appearance of a single star into daylight.
I dip my hand into the water again. Green algae spools around me. I push the sleeve of my coat up further so it bunches around my elbow. I lower my arm all the way, like I am reaching into the chest cavity of a giant.
I reach in, looking to tickle the base of the river. To find its beating heart.
I don’t find the soft, squishy dense organs, though. Or slippery, tangled weeds. The thing my hand settles on while groping in the wet infinite darkness is hard. Metal. Jagged.
I feel around, my fingers caking in silt. Yes. Metal things. Loads of them.
Small metal objects.
Keys? Are there … keys down here?
I clasp a handful and pull out my arm, and whatever I’m holding slices through my skin. Easy, soft, quiet, like a steak knife through a beanbag.
“Jesus!” I scream, yanking my hand out and cowering over it, dragging my closed fist towards my belly. Tutu bounds over, demanding to see my hand, intrigued by the blood and river water trickling down my arm. I shout at him to go away, more out of instinct than anything else. A small, rodent-like urge to be both frightened and private.
He backs away, hurt, and goes back to examining the snow. Slowly, I open my palm to try to examine the keys that have cut through me so easily.
But they’re not keys. Or, at least, not the kind of keys I was expecting: these are the big brass things used to wind up old toys, shiny and yellow like they’ve just fallen off a factory line. There are two in my hand, along with an assortment of rusted cogs of different sizes. A world of drawings and games and tiny little promises, all in the palm of my hand.
I look from my hand to the river, and wonder how much blood I lost in the exchange.
CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT
I BANDAGE MY HAND ALONE IN THE
