Nicola Griffith - Stay

“This is different.”

“So?”

She said it just the way Dornan had said, That’s how it works.

“What?” she said.

“I used to think I knew how the world works.” I gestured vaguely between us. I could feel the Vicodin rising like a tide.

“Does that mean you’re going to talk about it?”

Her face seemed a long way off. “Was it the tape you were burning?”

She flushed and nodded. “Did you—I watched it again, to be sure. It made me feel… I hate him.”

“He had a lot of tapes. He was a monster, I think.” My thoughts were bumping together like moored boats.

“If he was here, I’d shoot him like a dog.” Her voice was low and dark and vicious.

“I killed him.” It just slid out.

She stilled. Her face went white, then slowly pink again. “You… killed him?”

I nodded.

“You mean you really… You killed him? Like, he’s dead?”

“I think so.” Slippery words, like eels.

“You’re not sure?” She was looking at me, fascinated, the way you’d look at a just-born freak: should you strangle it before it draws its first breath, or raise it for the geek show. “Did he—Did it hurt?”

“Yes.”

She licked her lips. “You killed him for me.”

“No.”

“No?”

“No.”

She stood up, “I just have to—” and left the trailer abruptly. Images sloshed back and forth in my rocking brain: breaking teeth, sirens, the creak of his shoulder joint, blood-slicked hands…

The trailer door banged open. Tammy, nodding. Maybe I’d dozed off again. “So that’s why you asked if I’d ever told him anything about you,” she said. “Because of the police.”

The fire outside set light dancing around her head, like one of those lurid saint’s pictures. “I would have phoned the police from the airport. I would. But they were already there at—”

“The police were at the airport?”

“—Karp’s apartment and why did I care anyway, that’s something else that was different. I don’t—”

“Wait. I’m lost. What was different?”

“—understand why I cared about whether or not he died. I never did before, they try to hurt me and I hurt them first and no second thoughts, like in Norway, they were going to hurt Julia, and I just do it, I don’t feel bad afterwards, I don’t feel like this—”

“What? Stop. Stop. You went to Norway?”

“—do you know how blood sounds when it drips on ice, it’s like. Nothing you. Ever…” And my brain lurched, turned turtle, and sank.

Fever is a fairground, full of garish colors and grotesque rides and the sense that the fun will turn to terror any moment. I whirled brightly from one amusement to another. Julia, sitting on my lap, smiling at me while she nodded and talked on the phone. Diving into a glacier lake as a man lifted a rifle to his shoulder. Tammy, feeling my forehead and shouting at me. The sickening creak of Karp’s shoulder joint. Steel at my throat. Julia lying in a pool of blood on an Oslo street. Tammy saying, “Aud? Aud? Can you hear me? You have to take these.” Julia lying in a white-tiled room on a white hospital bed hooked up to white machines. Her mother sitting there, cradling her hand, cradling her with love. My mother sitting by my bed, telling me the story of how trolls always win. A terrible thumping and grinding in my head. Swallowing shiny beetles, purple and green. Back at the glacier again, choking as the lake closed over my head, except somehow I was in a bed at the same time and some woman was trying to drown me in a glass of water. Crawling: crawling on grass, on leaves, on a hard road, underwater, crawling away. Trying to hide. But bright light followed me everywhere, into every corner, under every bed, hunting, until it pinned me down and I opened my eyes. Daylight.

“Open,” Tammy said, as though I were a baby, and pushed something between my lips. I struggled weakly. Her grip on the back of my neck tightened. “Nice pills. Make you feel better. Come on, open up, just one.” I let her get it between my lips, then spat it onto the bed. She sighed wearily. “Your mother must have had fun when you were sick.”

The only time I remembered my mother being with me when I was ill was when I was seven or eight. I had tonsillitis. She told me the story about trolls; the only story, ever.

She picked up the pill. It was purple and green.

“What are you feeding me?” It sounded querulous.

“Aud?”

“Yes,” I said, cross. “What’s the pill?”

She sat on the bed, studied me a moment, then pulled a pill bottle from her jeans pocket. “You’ve been out of your mind with fever. I found these with your other first aid stuff.” She handed them to me. “They seem to work. Your fever’s down, anyway.”

I squinted at the bottle. Augmentin: antibiotics. “I should have thought of that.”

She snatched the bottle back. “Gee thanks, Tammy, for probably saving my life. Hey, Aud, no problem: I get such a kick out of nursing crazy people with a death wish who threaten to kill me every five minutes.”

“To kill you?”

“Well, hey Tammy, sorry for any inconvenience, sorry for scaring the shit out of you.” She turned away and wiped at her cheeks with the heel of her hand. “Ungrateful asshole.”

I was too tired for this. “Tammy.” She wouldn’t turn around. “I’m sorry.” I looked out of the window. Early afternoon. But what day? “I really said I’d kill you?”

She turned round. “A hundred times. You never shut up.”

“What did I say?”

“A lot of things. To do with the girl, mostly.”

“Julia’s not a girl.”

“Not Julia, the kid. The girl.”

At my blank look, she slid off the bed, and retrieved a folder from the table. She wore a thick cable-knit sweater, blue: mine. I realized it was cold in the trailer. She held out the folder. Bloody glove print on the cover.

“Luz. Her. It was in the car.”

I touched it with a fingertip but didn’t take it. Nine years old and being trained like a dog. “I’ll have to do something about her.”

Tammy dropped the folder back on the table. “Like what?”

I hadn’t meant to speak aloud. “I don’t know.” Nine years old. No one to love her. “What else did I say?”

“Bunch of stuff about glaciers and hospitals. Didn’t make much sense. You cried a lot. And sort of snarled like you were fighting someone. And at me when I said I was calling 911. ‘White!’ you shouted. ‘White!’ And you got out of bed and started to crawl to the door. I had to practically swear on the Bible I wouldn’t call a doctor before I could get you back to bed. But by then the antibiotics had started to work, anyhow. And then you started snarling again, only this time it was different. It—Is that what you’re like when—Was what you said before true? Did you kill him?”

“I don’t know.” I would have to do something about that, too.

When I woke, it was late afternoon.

“How are you feeling?”

“Better.” The fever was more or less gone. My neck and knee hurt, I was thirsty. The folder was still on the table. Nine years old. I sat up. It was still cold. “Give me the phone.”