broom handle, and grinned at him whenever the fluid shifted it around to a better view. It winked at him, it licked its lips. Sometimes Will caught glints of teeth when it did this. Sometimes, in his darker moments, when he believed that Joanna had died or had forgotten about him (believed he was part of a dream?), he imagined the thing was sizing him up.
Whether his mind was giving up on him or his injuries were causing delusions he couldn’t be sure, but he wondered now if the shadow he had seen in the church that morning, the morning after Sadie had forced herself upon him, was in some way an aspect of her reality, or a foreshadow of the thing that he had helped to impregnate in her. He had half-hoped, in some fractured way, that the shadow in the church had belonged to Catriona, or their dead child. A sign meant for him from them, a comfort.
“Do you know somebody called de Fleche?” Will asked, breathing hard as Sadie turned her body this way and that in a full-length mirror that had escaped the fire relatively undamaged. A crack across the centre jarred the firm length of her flesh slightly as she stretched and twisted, eyes following each curve as if seeing it for the first time. Her use of the whip had brought her out in a healthy glow. She was sheened with perspiration.
“I never looked so lovely,” she said, wistfully. “And I’ll always look like this.”
“De Fleche? Know him?” Will persevered.
She regarded him with ill-veiled disdain. “Of course I know him. Why do you think I was trained as an Insert in the first place? We were told the story, Christopher and me. We were given the meat and two veg of the whole affair.”
Will took advantage of Sadie’s distracted attention to sit down on the cinder-caked floor. The meat of his buttocks spread a little too broadly and moistly for his liking. “But you fucked it up for them?”
Sadie cupped her breasts with her hands and lightly pushed upwards. She licked her fingers and gently pinched her nipples erect. She shifted to let the light glance moistly off them, making a little affirmatory murmur. “They fucked it up for us, more like. We were promised all kinds of stuff. A lot of money, for a start. I was stuck in the shittiest job on the planet when I saw their advert. I was working in a canning factory. Who’d have thought they’d advertise for that kind of work?”
“What happened?”
Now Sadie had turned and was watching the muscles in her calves become taut as she stood on tip-toe. The foetus in its sac applauded silently.
“What happened was that Christopher went mad and, well, I suppose I did too, to a certain degree. We both legged it, but I had a better grasp of this terrain and used it often. Chris couldn’t get his malfunctioning head around it. They caught him and put him in the nuthouse. Safer for everyone with him in there.”
She bent over from the hips, her hands sliding down her thighs like some grotesque pole-dancer in a shifty drinking club. Her hand swung round to check on the curve of her backside. She made another approving sound, deep in her throat. Will could see that she was getting turned on. He pulled himself to his feet.
Sadie continued: “They realised they had got it wrong. A bit gate-after-the-horse-has-bolted and all that, but that’s what happened. I’ve had a price on my head for some time but they’ve never been close to getting me. They realised they needed kids. Impressionable types. It would have worked too, but they fucked up again, didn’t they? And now de Fleche has got it all wrapped up, nice and spicy.”
Sadie drew herself upright and stood opposite him, breathing hard. She was stroking the little V of fuzz between her legs. Will clenched his teeth when he glimpsed the thing in its womb: its tiny prick was hard and cherry-red, like a twist of lipstick.
“Call the doctor,” she said. “I think my waters are breaking.”
THE MAN IN the rugby shirt and the long scarf parked the car in the hospital car park, as close as he could to the main entrance. Then he turned to his wife. The hospital porter heard everything as he wheeled his laundry trolley from the geriatrics ward to the wash rooms, a brief trot in the cold between buildings. They had their windows down and it was a still, frosty night. He had good ears and the sound carried.
“I still don’t understand what we’re doing here, Joanna,” the man in the beanie said. “You’re beginning to scare me, do you realise that? Do you understand?”
His partner fumbled for the door lock, her limbs moving as though hampered by glue. “I’m okay, really I am. Stop worrying, Harry. You’ll get crow’s feet.”
“I’ll get that,” Harry sighed, climbing out of the car and coming round to the passenger side to help his wife. She felt brittle and hot under his fingers, like a pile of barbecued ribs. Her eyes had locked with the entrance doors of the hospital.
“He’s here,” she said.
“
Still gazing at the hospital doors, she cradled Harry’s face in her hands and kissed his cheek. “Darling, I am thrilled to see you.”
“Why are we here?”
“A friend is in need of my help.”
“Who?”
“A chap called Will. At least, I think that was his name.”
Harry puffed out his cheeks in frustration. “We don’t know any Wills. You’re imagining it. You’ve been out cold for days, love.”
“But you didn’t refuse to bring me here, did you?”
“Of course not. If anything, I thought we could do with some time away. Get up here, see the Lakes maybe. Go further. It’s been years since I went up as far as Ullapool.”
Joanna started walking towards the hospital.
“Wait,” cried Harry. “God, you can hardly walk. We’ve got a wheelchair in the back of the car you know.”
“I don’t need it.”
“Well, I’m sorry but
The couple toned down their conversation when they caught up with the porter, who smiled at them and helped Harry get the wheelchair up the ramp after a rogue patch of ice made him slip.
CHEKE WATCHED THEM move along the corridor after they had asked to see Will and were given a private room number. There was a policeman outside the room, warned the staff nurse. He might want to ask questions.
Cheke followed at a distance, dumping the laundry trolley for a new prop, a watering can that was sitting in the reception area. When the guy pushing the wheelchair looked around at her twice, she slipped into the nearest gents’ toilets and reassembled herself. Derek came out of the toilet, smoothing down his hair, straightening his ?500 Armani jacket.
She was getting the moves down pat, now. Gleave had shown her where she was going wrong. He had taught her what pain was. Not what she thought it was. She had thought pain was being born into a world without asking for it. She had thought pain was sifting alien molecules – a wall, a door, a pane of glass – through her own. It wasn’t. That was nothing next to the agonies Gleave visited upon her. She had told him she loved him when he started. By the end, she wanted him dead, his family dead. She wanted to find the bones of his ancestors, dig them up, and stomp them to splinters. But she was focused. She knew what was expected of her, and any interest she had shown in tampons, hairstyles, or whether to wear a liquid-filled or an underwired bra, was forgotten.
Gleave, standing over her, his arm in her throat up to his elbow. Gleave, ripping out her heart and showing her how black it was, how malformed. “Your heart in my hand, girl, and you stare up at me as if I was holding a sick puppy. You should be dead. If you were like us, you would be.”
And then:
