Chapter 22: Chapter 21

That day, it was raining.

The sky was the colour of dirty metal. The fragrance of the apricot tree was so intense that you could smell it from inside the house.

Asia’s voice was ringing through the air.

Dalma had dropped by to say hello, bringing a cake to thank Anna for the beautiful flowers she’d given her. Asia had also popped in on her way back from lectures and was chatting with them in the living room.

She hadn’t so much as said hello to me.

She had brought a packet of Norman’s favourite almond cookies. She left her bag on the couch, hung her jacket up and came into the kitchen where Anna and I were preparing tea.

‘Asia!’ Anna kissed her on both cheeks. ‘How were lectures?’

‘Boring,’ she replied, sitting at the kitchen counter.

I no longer expected her to acknowledge my presence.

Anna was placing the teapot on the tray when the doorbell rang.

‘Nica, could you bring the tea through, please?’ she said, before going to open the door.

I arranged the cups and saucers on the table in the living room, where Norman was saying hello to everyone. Dalma asked if we were expecting anyone.

I didn’t know who it could be. Between the clinking of the cups and the chatter, all I could make out was a man’s voice.

‘Mrs Anna Milligan?’ he asked.

After a few moments, I heard footsteps. The stranger came in, and I was surprised to hear Anna stammering, confused. Norman got to his feet, and I followed suit.

A tall, well-dressed man appeared on the threshold. I had never seen him before. He was wearing a jacket that squared his narrow shoulders and I glimpsed suspenders over his shirt. He wasn’t wearing a tie, and his face was inscrutable.

Everyone turned to look at him.

‘My apologies for the interruption,’ he said, noticing he wasn’t the only guest.

There was something professional about his way of speaking.

‘It was not my intention to disrupt a social gathering. I won’t take too much of your time.’

‘Excuse me, but who are you?’

‘Norman,’ Anna stammered. ‘He…’

‘You would be Mr Milligan?’ the man deduced. ‘Good afternoon. I apologise for any inconvenience. I must ask for a few minutes of your time.’

‘Of…our time?’

‘Well, no, not of yours,’ he corrected himself. ‘I have a few questions for the young people who live with you.’

‘What?’

‘The young people in your care, Mr Milligan.’ The man was extremely diligent. He looked around the room. ‘Are they home?’

A heavy silence fell. Then Asia and Dalma turned to me.

I was standing up, my back to the kitchen, so surprised that I was struggling to stifle the sound of my breathing.

The man’s eyes fell on me.

‘Is that Nica Dover? The girl who lives here?’

‘But what do you want from her?’ Anna asked courageously. He ignored her, his gaze fixed on me.

‘Miss Dover, I have a few questions to ask you.’

‘But,’ Norman burst out, ‘who are you? And what are you doing in our house?’

The man looked icily at him, then slid a hand inside his pocket.

He looked at him gravely, then pulled out a shiny police badge. ‘Detective Rothwood, Mr Milligan. Houston Police.’

Everyone stared at him in dismay.

‘W…what?’ Norman stammered.

‘There must have been some mistake,’ Anna interrupted. ‘Why on earth would you want to interrogate…’

‘Rigel Wilde and Nica Dover,’ the man read from a little card he’d pulled out of his pocket. ‘Resident at 123 Buckery Street, with Anna and Norman Milligan. That’s this address.’ Detective Rothwood slipped the card back inside his jacket then looked up at me. ‘Miss Dover, if you’ll allow it, I’d like to speak to you in private.’

‘No, no, wait a moment!’ Anna looked at him, determined, putting herself between us. ‘You can’t just turn up and demand to ask questions without any explanation! They’re minors, you can’t discuss anything with them if you don’t tell us why you’re here!’

Detective Rothwood glanced sideways at her. For a moment, I thought he was annoyed, but then I realised he had understood. Anna’s behaviour was the closest thing to maternal instinct that I had ever seen.

‘The information I require concerns a rather delicate matter that has recently come to our attention. An investigation has been opened, I am here to take statements and try to shed a little light on the matter.’

‘What matter?’

‘Certain incidents concerning Sunnycreek Home.’

I heard him as if from behind glass.

I froze. A terrible foreboding made its way inside me, and a high-pitched screeching sounded in my ears.

‘Sunnycreek?’ Anna frowned. ‘I don’t understand. What sort of incidents?’

‘Incidents dating back several years,’ the detective specified. ‘My intention is to confirm their veracity.’

The feeling of foreboding became a mole, then a bruise, then a stain, and finally, gangrenous. It seeped through me like ink, and I felt something scratching relentlessly.

It was my fingernails.

‘It’s a very serious matter. It is precisely in light of this that I am here.’

Something was wrong with the room, the walls were distorting, folding over me: a slow collapse, the loss of colour, the walls filling with cracks and cobwebs.

A small, dark room.

The detective’s eyes fuelled that ruin, as if I had feared this verdict my whole life.

Anna ushered me, Norman and the detective into the kitchen and quietly closed the door as the detective began to speak again.

‘Miss Dover. What can you tell me about Margaret Stoker?’

My throat closed. Alarm bells rang through my entire body. Reality started to derail.

‘Who is this woman? Why should they know her?’ demanded Anna.

‘We understand that Mrs Stoker was director of Sunnycreek Home before Angela Fridge. After several years of continuous service, however, she left the institute. The circumstances around her dismissal are unclear. Miss Dover, do you remember anything…in particular, about Margaret Stoker?’

‘Enough!’

Anna’s voice cut through the air. My heartbeat was deafening. Familiar reactions started coursing through me at a nauseating speed. I saw Anna standing in front of me, as if to shield me.

‘We want to know what’s going on. Enough with these meaningless answers! What’s this all about? Tell us, once and for all!’

Detective Rothwood was still staring at me. His gaze pierced me, stripped me, he seemed fixated. When I looked away, I could still feel it jabbing into me like a scalpel left by a surgeon.

‘A few days ago, a charge was brought to Houston Court by Peter Clay, an ex-resident at Sunnycreek Home, now an adult. The charge in question relates to several forms of punishment not in line with the institute’s directives.’

‘Punishment?’

‘Corporal punishment, Mrs Milligan.’ Detective Rothwood gave her a steely look. ‘Torture and brutality against children. Margaret Stoker is accused of mistreatment and aggravated abuse of minors.’

I didn’t hear anything else.

Peter throbbed in my mind. It was Peter.

The room spun violently around me.

Peter spoke. He had shattered the vase, and now the darkness was spilling everywhere, swallowing everything around it.

Icy, deranged feelings coursed through me, freezing my heart and crushing my stomach. The anxiety, the sweat, the suffocation. The nausea. The air pounded me as if it was alive, and my heart palpitations intensified to the point of hurting, of bursting through my chest.

Peter spoke, and now everything would come out. I had to hide, to find cover, to escape, but my legs were like lead and my body had turned to stone. Memories flooded my mind – the sound of metal, the feeling of leather – and fingernails mercilessly scratching and scratching and scratching.

My vision shook.

‘You can’t be serious…’ Anna murmured, as my tremors became ever more violent. ‘That…that’s inconceivable…Nica, she…’

She turned around. And she saw me.

She saw me, saw that I was a heap of shudders, my eyes devastated by a truth kept hidden for too long.

Me, a tangle of cold and sweat, anxiety and fear.

Me, trembling uncontrollably.

Her mouth fell open. Her gaze became incredulous and dismayed. Her voice made me want to disappear.

‘Nica…’ she whispered, distraught.

Terror roared in me like a monster. My skin cracked apart, my heart was racing at over a hundred beats a second, and feverish anxiety took my breath away. I was full of shivers, it felt like I was being crushed again – the belt, the powerlessness, the dark, the screams.

I took a step backwards.

Everyone was staring at me in horror and dismay, and No, no, no, don’t look at me like that, I’ll be good, the little girl inside of me screamed, I’ll be good, I’ll be good, I’ll be good, I swear.

Now they knew how ugly, broken, useless and ruined I was, and suddenly everyone was looking at me like She looked at me, everyone had her eyes, her gaze, her condemnation and her scorn. I saw her face, I heard her voice, sensed her smell, felt her hands on my bruises, and it was too much. It was unbearable.

My heart burst.

‘Nica!’

I fled, my pupils dilated and my lungs full of panic.

I ran through the kitchen, but quickly collided with something. I looked up, my eyes stinging with tears, and with a violent shudder saw that he had heard everything.

Rigel’s gaze was the final blow. His eyes were dim, full of what we had both always known. They shattered me for good.

I stepped around him and ran out the back door. Voices called after me as I dove outside, the rain getting into my throat. Like never before, I needed the sky, the open air, to get away from bricks and mortar, to know they were as far away as possible.

I fled because that’s what I had always done.

I fled because their looks were more than I was able to bear.

I fled, because I wasn’t brave enough to see myself in their eyes.

As I ran, my lungs at the point of collapse, the storm pouring down on me, I realised that no matter how far I got from The Grave, it would always follow me.

She and that dark room would never leave me.

I would never truly be free.

Desperation made me run faster and faster. I tore through a world of rain and the image of Anna’s disappointed face clawed at my soul until I collapsed into the mud in the park near the river.

My clothes were soaked through. I hid away there, under the shelter of a bush, like I did in the grounds of The Grave, trying to escape from Her. I looked for green, for peace, for silence, and prayed that she wouldn’t find me.

The cold bit at my skin. Water soaked through my shoes and my breath became a feeble rattle.

I lay there until the cold seeped into my bones, freezing everything. Slowly, my vision clouded over.

As everything dimmed and faded around me, I heard footsteps slowly coming towards me through the torrential rain. They stopped in front of me. Breathing ever more slowly, I glimpsed a pair of shoes before everything went dark.

As my senses left me, a pair of arms lifted me off the ground. They enveloped me and I recognised a familiar smell, a scent that broke something inside me. It smelt like home. I dissolved into his warm embrace, burrowing my face in his neck.

‘I’ll be good,’ I whispered feebly.

And then the darkness swallowed me up.