Nicola Griffith - Slow River

The muscles in her jaw had relaxed a little, and her pupils were returning to normal.

“I was kidnapped. You know that. When they, when I escaped, I couldn’t go back.” The rest stuck in my throat like small polished pebbles.

“Why? And why did you lie?”

I sat there, mute.

“I feel like such a fool. Do you have any idea how used I feel? All that time I was ordering you around, telling you to bring me this readout or that, treating you like an apprentice. Making you work like that. All that time, you knew, you knew…” She swirled the remains of her loc around the glass. “You know something? You’ve made me feel ashamed of myself. Of how I bullied you. I don’t like that.”

“You didn’t bully me.”

She wasn’t listening. “But why? That’s what I don’t understand. You say you need the money, but why? Why aren’t you back with Mummy and Daddy—”

“Don’t.” Sharper than I intended. “Please, don’t call them that.”

“Fine. Your family, then. Why aren’t you with them, in your fancy house, or estate, or whatever?”

“Ratnapida.”

“What?”

“The house. It’s called Ratnapida.” Stella in the fountain. Oster. Then, later, Oster and Tok, standing side by side. Tok looking beaten.

“Whatever. You could be in the sunshine, doing nothing. So why are you hiding? And what happened to the real Sal Bird?”

I think I killed someone, I had told her. “I never met her. She died in an accident.” I waited for her to decide whether or not to believe me. I knew I looked calmer than I felt. Years of training at the dinner table.

She absorbed that, nodding. Still expressionless. “Go on.”

“The man I killed…” I swallowed. The man I killed. “It was one of the men who kidnapped me.” I told her about the tent, the drugs. About Crablegs and the camera. About finding the nail.

“This is hard. I haven’t thought about it. It was… So when they took me outside, after they’d told me my family hadn’t paid… I thought… it just…” Another swallow. I looked down at my hand on the bar. This was not something I wanted to think about. I stared at my fingertips, the way the skin curled pinkly around the nails. She put her hands on mine, warm and dry. I still couldn’t look up. Try, that hand said. “I had the nail hidden in my fist. When we got outside I hit him in the neck.”

She lifted her hand from mine and picked up her drink. “Was he dead?”

“The other one, Crablegs, he said I’d killed him. “But…” But of course Crablegs would want me to think that. Keep me confused, docile. “I don’t know. I just assumed.”

“Then that’s the first thing we do tomorrow.”

“We?”

She just looked at me, indecipherable.

I felt strange. “I need another drink.”

We were quiet while the drinks arrived.

“When did it happen, the kidnap?”

“September. Three years ago.” Crisp clean air like the scent of apples. The cobbles, blood. Only he might not be dead after all. And Magyar had said we.

“September. Right. So we’ll look at all the murder reports from three—”

But I wasn’t listening. I might not have killed him after all. “Do you have any idea what this means to me?” I said suddenly.

Her voice was soft. “Why don’t you tell me?”

I put my hand on hers, the one still wrapped around her glass. Neither of us said anything. We both pretended our hands weren’t warm and soft together, palm to back, finger on finger, the hair of her forearm touching the underside of my wrist.

“I want to tell you something. About my family. Why Stella killed herself. No one else knows.” Not even Spanner. Do you know what I’m entrusting to you? I think she did. “My father loved me. That’s what I thought. But then I found out my sister Stella had been…” I couldn’t say it. It was as though there were a clothespin crimping that part of my mind together. I had to talk about it. “I had bad dreams about a monster. My older sister, Greta—she was already grown by the time my mother married my… Anyway, she understood what was really happening. She gave me a lock for my door, so…” the monster “my…” the monster “so Oster couldn’t come into my bedroom when I was alone. Stella went into therapy. Tok said she was getting better, but then she killed herself. And I hadn’t known anything. All that time, he was doing that to her. Had been. And then when she got older, when she wasn’t a helpless child anymore, he tried it on me. But Greta knew.” Greta, always gray and stooped, hesitant as though something was about to come around the corner and get her. “I think it had happened to her, too. What I can’t understand…” The air in the bar seemed too thick all of a sudden, the oxygen all used up. I wanted to go belly to the ground, where it was safer, where it was easier to breathe. “What I can’t understand is why no one told me. Tok knew. Stella knew. Greta knew. I didn’t. I should have guessed. There were all these clues. He even… He even took me for a walk and asked me what I knew, what I had been told.”

What did Stella say? he had asked.

No one tells me anything, I replied.

But Greta had tried. Or at least she had got me the lock.

Magyar was frowning. “I’m trying to understand something. You said you thought Oster turned to you when Stella was too old…”

“Yes.”

“But you think Greta was abused, too.”

“Yes.”

“Lore.” Her eyes were soft, trying to tell me something, but I had no idea what. She sighed. “Tell me about the time… Tell me about the night the monster came to you.”

“I dreamt. At least that’s what Katerine said when I woke up with her hand on my shoulder.”

“Katerine was there when you woke up?”

“Yes.” I was puzzled.

“Lore.” She took both my hands in hers. “Just think a minute. You dreamed about the monster, and when you woke it was Katerine who was there.” I looked at her blankly. “You say Greta had been abused, too. But she was an adult by the time your mother and father married.”

“Yes…” I said slowly.

“Then if the abuser likes them young, it couldn’t have been Oster.”

Absurdly it was Tok who came to mind, his laugh of disbelief when I shouted at him about being mean to Katerine, demanded to know if he realized what he was doing to her: What I have done to her?

“It’s too hot in here. I have to go outside.” The air was so thick I felt as though I was swimming toward the door, fighting for breath. I leaned against the wall outside, gasping. I had forgotten to bring my coat. Through my thin shirt the bricks were hard against my shoulder blades.

Katerine on the bed, fully dressed. “It’s a dream,” she said to Oster. Oster, who was just stumbling into the room.

Magyar came out, our coats draped over her arm. She held mine out silently.

“But she’s my mother,” I said finally.

“Yes.”

My mother, the monster. Which meant Oster wasn’t a monster after all. This time I had to bend forward, head nearly to my knees, before I could get air into my lungs.

My mother, the monster. And Oster—he could be my father again. The one I thought I’d lost.

I started pulling on my coat. “I have to go.”

“Go where? Are you all right.”

“I don’t know. But I need to think.”

The air above the wharf was heavy with damp, the scent of timbers softened and swollen with rain and river water. I slipped down the right alleyway, found the panel set in the pavement, and levered it open. I laid my fingers lightly on the switches, then Hipped them. The lights went out.

There was no moon and the stars hid behind soft black clouds; nothing to reflect from the water. Just me. I sat down on the wharf, careless of the cold. I could feel the river rather than see it: distended by the rains of the last two days to a thick, dark tongue feeling its way blindly to the sea. Somewhere downriver a barge bumped hollowly against its moorings. Water lapped softly at the timbers.