Nicola Griffith - Always

Their faces grew pink.

“Now that you’re breathing nicely and there’s no more danger of passing out, it’s safe to address some of the other fear symptoms. If your arms and legs are trembling, but you don’t yet know if you should run or fight, try clenching and relaxing them. If your mouth is really dry, open your mouth slightly—if it’s safe to do so—and run the underside of your tongue over your bottom front teeth. That should make your mouth water. Do this for a few seconds, and swallow a couple of times, and gradually the dryness will go away and your larynx will relax. So now we’re ready to use our voices.”

Ten pairs of shoulders rose. Well, they were going to have to get over that.

“Voice is an important body weapon. In its way, it’s as useful as a kick or punch. Voice can embarrass or frighten a potential attacker. It can summon help, give warning, and say no, loudly and clearly. It can give you confidence, and deafen your attacker, actually damage an eardrum. Voice can immobilize an attacker or potential attacker for a split second.” Therese made a slight huh of skepticism. I started walking around the inside of the circle. “Voice increases the power of any physical move you might make because it helps you focus your attention and your strike. Voice depends very much on the way we breathe. Make the voice come from deep down, as though it’s from your thighs and stomach, not your throat and head. You want a deep, explosive sound.” I stopped in front of Therese. “Like this:

“Huut!”

The sound slammed into her face and blew her backwards. Her arms pinwheeled. I resumed walking while she shook her head and pulled herself together.

“Spread out just a little. We’re going to do some squats.” I demonstrated. “Slow and easy. Breathe out through your mouth as you go down, in through your nose as you come up. Down, out.” The less self-conscious made a kind of ooourff as they went down. “Up, in. Down, out. Up, in. Now a little faster. Down!” More oourff s. “Up. Down! Good. Let me hear some noise now. A deep sound, a boom. Feel it blast out of you, like a train from a tunnel. Ooosh! All together. Ooosh. ” The entire circle dropped, like a falling hoop. Half made a noise. “Up, and in. And oosh. ” More of the hoop sounded. “And up and in and oosh. ” Gaps in the hoop only from Jennifer and Katherine and Sandra. “And up and in and oosh !” Katherine sounded. Not much, but something. The circle was almost closed. “Up and in and oosh! Up, in, oosh!” An uncertain ooh? from Jennifer. Almost. “Up and in and oosh !” Jennifer’s ooh firmed and strengthened. Katherine was as loud as the rest. “Up and in and oosh! Louder. Ooosh! Louder. Ooosh!” I walked around, breathing, booming, listening. And there, at last, a thin, hesitant sound, wavering like a ghost. “Louder. Ooosh! ”

The hoop dropped, the sound flared up, unbroken, like a ring of fire. My face stretched in a fierce grin: you breathe, you make a noise, the next thing you know you’re talking back, and then, next time he thinks about hitting you, you leave.

Ooosh.

Ooosh.

Ooosh.

“Louder! Blow your attacker into the back of next week. Use that fear, use that anger. Louder. And up, and in, and one last time. Ooosh! ”

The sound was tremendous; I felt it through the soles of my feet. If there had been a window, it would have rattled.

“Yes!” Suze said, pumping her arm.

Everyone was grinning. Tonya turned away briefly, but not before I saw the sparkle on her cheeks. Sandra looked as though she had seen God.

“Whoo!” Kim said. “We kicked ass! ”

The basement door opened.

It was like watching a pride of lionesses lift their dripping muzzles from the belly of the dying zebra and zero in on the giggling hyena.

The face of the long-haired woman in the doorway went white. Classic fear response. The scent of mass-produced incense, and the whine-and-tinkle of Crystal Gaze’s sound system—three women with nasal problems singing Om-mani-padme-hum—drifted into the basement. The woman swayed, clutched for the doorknob, missed, nearly fell.

“Breathe,” Nina advised.

Everyone laughed. The woman in the doorway looked as though she might cry. I recognized her from behind the cash register upstairs. “How can I help you?”

“I, uh.”

“Breathe, honey,” Nina said again.

We all waited politely. “You, uh, that is, the customers were wondering…” She didn’t seem to know how to proceed.

“Were we too loud, honey?”

“Yes. Loud. You were loud.”

“They heard you upstairs,” I told everyone. “Through the concrete and the floors and over the sound system.”

“Excellent!” Christie said.

I CALLED DORNAN BEFORE BREAKFAST. HE WOULDN’T PICK UP. I LEFT A LONGmessage. When I called again, half an hour later, he answered.

“It didn’t look like work,” he said.

“No.”

“In fact, it looked to me as though I showed up just in time.”

An image popped into my head of Dornan in baggy blue shorts and sagging tights, cape askew, kicking down the door to my suite to the accompaniment of melodramatic music.

“I did, didn’t I? Show up in time?”

Depends how you look at it. “Yes.” Though I hadn’t got the information I’d wanted.

“Aud, don’t take this the wrong way, but are you sure you’re all right?”

“How do you mean, exactly?”

“Last night just… well, it’s not like you. The whole idea strikes me as baroque and too complicated, all that potential for things to go wrong. And the timing. It’s almost as though you set yourself up for it. At best, it seems uncharacteristically silly.”

Irresponsible. Then a victim. Now silly. “Every week a new high.”

“Yes, well, that’s probably some sort of joke, but those drugs were truly wicked. Most of those other people are still in hospital. One of the carpenters just had to go back on a ventilator, for God’s sake.”

He was very well informed.

“Look, why don’t we just go back to Atlanta? You don’t really care about your warehouse anyway, and you’ve seen your mum. I’ve seen enough of the Seattle chains. I have some ideas to be working on, and, besides, the business is probably dissolving with no one looking after it. Let’s just leave. Don’t get distracted. What happened with the drugs is irrelevant, like, like an earthquake. It affected you, yes, but it wasn’t aimed at you. It wasn’t personal.”

“Oh, but it was.”

“More than a dozen people—”

“Dornan, think about it. This whole thing has been aimed at getting me to sell the warehouse cheaply. Who I was didn’t matter, it was the fact that I owned the warehouse. They began by reducing my cash flow sharply, by calling OSHA and EPA to harass my leaseholder, which they hoped would make whoever owned the warehouse view it as a liability. It was a liability. But then Rusen came along. He started trying to deal with the problem, he tried to talk to EPA and OSHA, so then whoever was engineering all this had to start messing with the production itself.” The day-as-night exposures, the lighting setup, the props. “And when Rusen, with his unexpected corporate efficiencies, starts trying to find ways to finesse that, and keeps making his payments to me, they start to scramble and dump drugs in the coffee. Which I drink. Ironic if you stop to think about it. Two months ago all they would have to have done is make me an offer. As you’ve said, I didn’t really care. The only reason I came out here in the first place was to be distracted.”