43. Wrecking Ball

2019 November 8
Friday

Two minutes of silence.

Jenny would light candles, and she used to, before she started doing this with him, when it was only one, but when she became pregnant with Ada, when suddenly her life meant something, when suddenly her safety was important, she made the switch. She bought the candle, she told him, and she set it down in the middle of the dining table that she never uses, and all she could think about was how flammable everything was. How the boxes and files of papers that she had yet to deal with — had yet to angrily shred — and the curtains and the cushions and even the stupid ugly tablecloth could all go up. And then the little life inside her would be lost before it had taken so much as its first breath.

When Laura died, life became precious to her, but in such an abstract way that it seemed almost to devalue her own. People were important; Jenny wasn’t. And then Ada came along, and there was someone who meant more to her even than Laura did. Someone worth living for.

Mark always got that, she said once. And then she frowned. Because he can’t have got it, not properly, or he wouldn’t have done what he did. He wouldn’t have forced her to remember him every year on this date.

You get it, though, don’t you? She asked that over and over.

The sole remaining Vogel boy, all that remains of Laura. He must live. He must thrive.

And he must join her in these precious moments of silence.

So Russell does, kneeling beside her on the little mat she was given by a friend at the outreach centre, the one with the beautiful and intricate patterning, and he holds her hand, and while Jenny looks up at the night sky through the obsessively clean glass patio door, Russell closes his eyes and tries to think thoughts worthy of such a moment.

Laura Vogel; his mum.

Mark Vogel; his big brother.

They mourn them together, the two who lived remembering the two who weren’t so lucky. And Russell is absolutely the fuck not bitter about it.

All his life, Russell’s been the second priority. To everyone, it’s always seemed. He was the younger son, less important than Mark, or at least taking up less of everyone’s time, because while Russell kept his head down and just got on with it, everything Mark did was huge and dramatic. Mum was always so worried about him, paid him so much attention. Left little for Russell.

And then Mum died, and Russell was somehow second to a memory in his brother’s priorities. The same went for Dad, too, though where Mark wallowed in Mum’s absence, Dad tried to act as if it hadn’t happened, as if her memory was something to be assiduously and constantly cleaned away, like a recurring mould stain. Neither preoccupation left room for Russell, who had to get through the death of his mum mostly alone.

At least he’d had Stef. Though, again, kind of not. Would he and Stef have even been friends if it weren’t for Mark? He was always well aware that Stef got excited when Mark came home, more than he ever did for Russell. Which, fucking unfair. Stef didn’t even cheat off of Russell’s science homework! He got Mark to help him with it instead! Even before Russell had understood exactly why he’d felt so drawn to Stef, that had hurt.

Finally, Mark’s big disappearing act. Wedging himself permanently into the hearts of everyone who knew him. Carving out a wound that would never fully heal. The narcissism of suicide. Fucking prick. If Russell could go back to that day, he’d show him pictures of all the people he hurt, of Jenny, of Stef. He’d show him the hole he was about to leave in their lives. Christ, this time of year he always wants to take the memory of his older brother by the lapels and shake him until he gets it, until he understands that you move through the world together, as a family, as friends, and that if you pull away, if you destroy yourself, you don’t just leave pain in your wake, you leave a familial unit struggling to replace you, struggling to find a way to continue.

Russell’s family, reduced as it was to just him and Dad, didn’t. And so Russell put his head down — again — and worked hard and moved out at the first opportunity. Got himself a job. Paid his own way.

You can’t rely on people. Stef pulled away after Mark’s disappearance the same way Mark did after Mum’s death. It was like Stef’s whole life became about Russell’s stupid dead stupid brother. Nothing left for Russell.

Jenny’s the only one left in Russell’s life from before. Jenny and Ada, now all grown up and barely needing babysitting at all, though Russell’s still happy to give Jenny the odd night for free here and there. Sometimes she doesn’t even go out, just has him over for the company, and it’s nice. They’ve grown close. She was the first person he told that he was even thinking about his sexuality, and when he finally worked himself out, she was again the first to know. She was delighted. You’re just like your mother, she said, and kissed him on his forehead.

You’re just like your mother, and don’t ever tell your father.

Ada never knew Mark. It’s one of the many things Russell likes about her. She was too young when Mark sat for her, and when Mark withdrew and then ultimately disappeared, Ada still needed sitting, Jenny still needed help, and Russell needed money and something to distract him.

Ada never knew Mark. It’s why she’ll never see this: Russell and Jenny kneeling together in silence, remembering someone who died before Ada was born, and someone who killed himself before she could form sentences.

Shit. He’s unworthy of this. He loved Mark, he really did. And he feels his absence every day. But, Christ, he was a fucking wrecking ball. Is there anyone he didn’t hurt? Even Shahida, that girl he used to date — or whatever that was — and her friends! He hasn’t seen Shahida in years, but he runs into Amy every so often. Nice girl. Bit posh.

And then Jenny breathes out, turns to him, smiles, and bumps against him, and that means it’s been two minutes, and he can consign his complicated, beloved, difficult brother back to memory where he belongs.

“Come on,” Jenny says. “Ada’ll be back from school soon. You staying? I’m making garlic chicken.”

She always asks. She doesn’t like to impose or assume. And it’s nice of her, because Russell doesn’t like to feel unwelcome.

“Yeah,” he says, pushing up off his knees, “I’m staying.”

“Good. You can help chop things.”

 

2020 January 13
Monday

Good news and bad news.

The good news: Elle’s police liaison has informed her that only two surviving breast implants have been recovered from the gravesite at Stenordale, and she estimates that no more are likely to be found, at least not at the primary site. God only knows what old Smyth-Farrow did with them, whether he recovered them from the soil or — and Elle cleaves to this option, simply because it is more grisly and thus more in keeping with what she understands about the perverted little fuck — carved them from the bodies postmortem, but however they were obtained, they’re gone.

It would be nice to imagine that questing tree roots unearthed them and gently bore them to the surface, but women of the kind that Smyth-Farrow preferred don’t get that kind of luck. No, there was a violation involved; of that, Elle is certain.

Still, only two breast implants among nineteen fragmented and heavily decomposed bodies. Not only does it further confuse the issue regarding the sex of the dead, it will very probably point the police in the wrong direction. In Elle’s experience, the average cis mind does not assume transfemininity when any other option is available; they will be searching the records for missing cis women. Tragically, there is an abundant supply.

So. That’s the good news.

The bad news: it is possible that serial numbers might be recoverable from the implants. Elle’s liaison is not yet in place to check, though she plans to try, but if the implants can be identified, then that’s a problem. Oh, she doesn’t expect them to be traceable to Dorley Hall’s old surgeons, not unless Dorothy Marsden surrounded herself with complete idiots — and she did not — but an identifiable serial number provides a timeframe and at least part of a supply chain. Elle thinks of Dorley Hall, as it is now, existing at the end of a very long and heavily knotted rope, where each knot represents a bundle of evidence, and every knot that is found, examined and untied leads the police closer to the hall, closer to Beatrice; closer to Elle herself. Just because the rope is long and the knots many, doesn’t mean there isn’t enough evidence, buried across the country, eventually to reach the top.

Old men, Elle muses. Old men and their appetites, with social-climbing gender traitors like Dorothy and her girls only too happy to sacrifice others to feed them, to keep their own bodies to themselves. She could kill a hundred of them, kill a thousand, kill a thousand bloody thousand, and it wouldn’t be enough.

All this from just one of the macabre memorials to their victims. How many other bodies are there? Elle has a fair idea, and it’s a number she doesn’t like to contemplate, especially because she knows how many of them she is personally responsible for: three times, when she got too close, her targets had their victims quietly murdered, and though she learned quickly to stay her hand, to strike only when the advantage was utterly and undeniably hers, those three bodies are her responsibility and hers alone.

Shit.

Shit bloody shit.

The day a British aristocrat does something virtuous with their money will be the day the Earth is swallowed by the sun, but could Smyth-Farrow and his odious little club not have taken up even a mildly less repulsive hobby?

Elladine needs to do something. She can feel the energy boiling under her skin, and every moment, every hour, every day she waits at this facility, hiding behind her personal military, makes her want to scream, want to stab the code into the safe under desk and bloody well arm up, want to walk out of here with every weapon she can get her hands on and fucking gut something. Her hands are shaking, her teeth are jammed so violently together that her breath comes out as a hiss, and before she knows what she’s doing she’s ripped her office phone out of its desk mount, torn the cord from its base, and thrown it overarm at the wall.

It leaves, as she hoped it would, a bloody great dent. She always was picked first for rounders.

As she stands there, her chest heaving, her mind clearing, as the plastic base of the phone that stuck momentarily into the wall is dislodged by its own weight and crashes to the ground, Elladine Lambert feels something close to complete, something close to righteous, something close to necessary for the first time in a long while.

In the doorway, the girl waiting for her attention — who jumped a mile high when Elle threw the phone — whimpers a little.

“Yes?” Elle demands.

“Um, Ms Lambert?” The girl’s voice is quavering, like she’s afraid of her or something, which is ridiculous: Elle might on occasion do violence to office equipment and to the very specific targets of her ire, but inside the walls of Peckinville, the only staff she has ever exercised her temper on have been the bloody washouts from Beatrice’s sainted little institution, and even with them, it’s been mostly part of the act. And this girl, unless Elle is very much mistaken, has not washed out of anywhere. Why she’s fawning — bloody well biting her lip, crossing her ankles, gripping her hands tight — is therefore a damned mystery.

If there’s one thing Elle has little patience for, it’s unnecessary obsequience.

“What is it?”

“There’s a visitor at reception. A lawyer.” Elle twirls a finger in the air: get on with it. “Right,” the girl says. “Um, she’s a lawyer for Ms Smyth-Farrow. Ms Smyth-Farrow’s lawyer. Or so she says.”

Wait. The Smyth-Farrow whelps have sent someone over? Interesting! “Send her up,” Elle says, and then barks out, “Wait. Pick that up—” she points at the wreckage by the wall, “—and get rid of it. Then send her up.”

“Yes, ma’am.”

At least the bloody girl doesn’t comment on the smashed phone, merely picking it up and cradling it in her arms. Elle watches her trot back out into the hall, heels clattering staccato on the hard floors. A transfer, presumably; she can’t see why anyone else would be so nervous. Jackie or Jan or someone will have vetted her, so she’s got to be competent and trustworthy. Rather offputting to have her be so damned skittish.

So. Henrietta Smyth-Farrow’s sticking her oar in, is she? Is this lawyer a trusted confidante or merely someone on staff who happened to be local? Either way, Elle can expect her to report back as soon as she is out of surveillance range. Which, obviously; Elle’s people have the same standing instructions.

Faced with an underling from a rival, and a dangerous one at that, a lesser woman might straighten her clothing, check her hair and makeup, and so on, but Elle can’t be bothered with all that fuss. The woman coming up here will bloody well know who Elle is: she’s the kind of aristocrat who didn’t let her vicious, bloodthirsty parents survive for long enough to waste the family money on pleasure, and she certainly didn’t allow the prior holders of the family name to write her out of their wills. She is someone who has been winning the game that Crispin Smyth-Farrow ultimately lost for two decades now, and no Jane-come-lately like Henrietta Smyth-Farrow — or, heaven forfend, her idiot brother — can touch her.

There’s always the possibility, though, that the lawyer doesn’t know who she is, doesn’t understand the vipers’ nest into which she’s been thrown, and Elle might almost prefer that; it is ever so much fun grabbing some unsuspecting underling by their wrinkly parts and shaking them up and down.

Either way, that Elle Lambert currently looks, charitably, like someone who was dragged backwards through several thorny hedges is of no concern. It’s the Smyth-Farrows, for pity’s sake! For all their new Evangelical money and their attempts to throw their weight around via association with Dorothy Marsden, they are still small fish. And Elle isn’t even a bloody shark; she’s on the shore with a barbed spear, and sooner or later, one or both of Crispin Smyth-Farrow’s children will wind up stuck with her weapon, to be hauled to the shore, exposed, wounded, and suffocating on air.

The woman, when she appears, wears the uniform of the moneyed and married middle class: a trouser suit, likely off the rack and subsequently altered to fit; low heels, because to the circles she moves in, high heels are too feminine and flats mean that you are not a serious woman; light makeup; swept-back, sensible hair. She probably looks the bomb when she bestrides the offices of the law firm she is presumably partnered in.

A tad pathetic, really.

Still, Elle stands and crosses the floor to shake her hand, because she is nothing if not polite. And because she rather wants to give this professional ladder-climber a view of how a woman can dress when she actually matters: old jeans, a chunky sweater, and a pair of walking boots that belonged to her mother. What was Henrietta wearing the last time Elle encountered her? A dreadful block-coloured dress, if memory serves. And blonde-dyed hair sculpted into an unflattering church porch over her spotted forehead. As if she had decided that the way to butter up the Americans was to play dress-up in the wardrobe department of Fox News. Christ, woman; have some dignity.

“Elle Lambert,” she says, focusing intently on Henrietta Smyth-Farrow’s envoy and twisting a corner of her mouth into something approximating a smile.

“Rosa Carr,” the woman says, revealing an American accent. Ah, so she’s completely out of her depth, then. But probably quite close to Henrietta. Elle gestures at the chairs arrayed on the visitor side of her desk, and returns to hers. Ms Carr, however, declines to sit. “I’ll be brief. This is a courtesy visit. Silver River Services will brook no further interference with the police investigation into the bodies at Stenordale Manor.”

“‘No further interference’?”

“Yes. The police must be allowed to conduct their investigation unobstructed.”

Elle sits on the edge of her desk, affecting nonchalance. And the truth is, she really doesn’t care about this conversation. “Is old Henny going to let the constabulary into her knicker drawers, too?”

“Ms Smyth-Farrow has not been a part of this decision chain,” says Ms Carr.

“I’m sure.” Dreadful liar, this Carr woman. “So what does make Henrietta Smyth-Farrow think we have any interest in the bodies her father buried under the rose bushes?”

“We are aware of the extent of your operations within this country.” Rosa Carr says, emphasising the final two words with a rehearsed sneer, as if to imply that Peckinville, with its British, European and North African interests, is somehow the more parochial outfit, and further suggesting that Silver River’s marginal presence in the United States represents a serious international concern and not, for example, a convenient hole into which various moneyed psychopaths can shovel their swindled money, secreting it and their noxious private interests in the shallow grave of a laxly monitored security company.

“Are you, indeed?” Elle says brightly, broadening her smile.

“You have also taken possession of some of Ms Smyth-Farrow’s personal property.”

This pulls a small frown out of Elle, one she’s irritated she’s slightly too tired properly to suppress. She needs a proper fucking, is what she needs; a fuck and a nightcap and a good night’s sleep. And, sadly, she suspects that even if Beatrice were still amenable after the return of Valérie Barbier to her breast, she would not be receptive to a call, for example, this evening.

She’ll have to make other arrangements. One of her second choices is most likely available, fortunately.

“Spill it,” she snaps, bored of this ridiculous meeting. “What do we have that is so precious?”

“You are aware,” the Carr woman says.

“I’m quite certain I am not.”

Rosa Carr rolls her eyes. “This resource is of a… personal nature.”

She pushed on the ‘person’ in ‘personal’. So. Trevor Darling. Well, he’s Elladine’s now, and he will be getting the best possible care. Ordinarily, Elle would try to persuade a failed feminisation of the merits of womanhood, but Trevor? She would quite like it if Trevor became the most masculine man there ever has been, just to spite Henrietta Smyth-Bloody-Farrow. Perhaps he might be interested in becoming a mixed-martial-arts competitor? Or a professional wrestler?

“I’m terribly sorry,” she says, smiling once more, “but do not know to whom you are referring.” She says it that way, ‘accidentally’ slipping in a ‘whom’ rather than a ‘what’, because this American lawyer seems a tad dim, and would benefit from having the obvious shoved in her sculpted face. “In the interests of… international cooperation, though, might we offer old Henny a gift basket? There’s a shop in the village that does them. Local cheeses. Quite wonderful. The muffins, I’m afraid, are merely adequate.”

The lawyer stares at her for a moment, and then says, without alteration to her facial expression, “The message has been delivered. Further communication will take place over official channels. Thank you for your time, Ms Lambert.”

“Pleasure,” Elle says, immediately turning away from her, dismissing her, so that Rosa Carr, if she would like the last word, will have to utter it to Elle’s disinterested back. She picks up her mobile from the desk and checks off a few notifications, busying herself until Rosa Carr is gone from her office, and then she drops her phone onto the desk — with rather more care than she showed her office line; mobiles are not expensive but it is rather cumbersome to transfer one’s credentials to a new device — and walks over to the false window, wishing that she could, at times like this, look out upon rolling fields, or a vast and vibrant city, resenting that she is stuck underneath and behind concrete, and will be for the duration of this crisis, if that is what this is.

Bloody Henrietta. That she is trying to throw her weight around would be charmingly naive, if she weren’t attempting to throw it in Elladine’s direction.

Shit, though. For all that Silver River is a bug compared to the hungry housecat that is Peckinville, bugs can be damned irritating, and sometimes small can also mean quick. She’ll task more operatives, she’ll get more eyes on the investigation, and she’ll obsess over it all some more, no doubt. What’s most irritating is that there is no way to know whether the Smyth-Farrows want to keep her out because there is something more to be found on the premises, because there is something going on with the investigating police, or simply because they want to get their own spin on the situation without interruption or preemption.

Double shit. It could have all been so simple. If the fire hadn’t been set, if Peckinville had found their way in a day or two earlier, if Valérie and Trevor and even Diana and that odious little street creature Frankie had been safely and quietly delivered into Elle’s care, they could have resolved all of this without fuss or further incident. Dorothy Marsden would be dead, the Silver River soldiers would be promptly debriefed and returned, and Elle could have made a wonderfully satisfying show of handing Stenordale Manor and its environs back over to Henrietta Smyth-Farrow, picked clean of information and as bare and useless as the day it was constructed.

At least they got a handful of hard drives, though. Replaced them with data-scrambled and artfully burnt dummies, as per usual. Elle’s technical people are poring over them now, but as she has been informed repeatedly, encryption takes time to break. And sometimes does not yield at all.

Bloody Stenordale. Aggravating that it was off their radar for so long, that Dorothy Marsden was able to indulge herself for so long after her ousting from Dorley Hall — and at the expense of just one woman! Elle had found it difficult to look Valérie Barbier in the eye during their meeting, and in her presence, it was all Elladine could do to keep herself from picturing the horrors of her life, the decades of servitude, of sexual enslavement, of depravity unending.

She’d had to cross her legs to keep from squirming. The only thing that had tempered her arousal was, contradictorily, the presence of Valérie herself; the strength of the woman is beyond admirable, but the glimpses she offered Elle — unwillingly, no doubt — into her true depth of her feelings were enough to throw cold water onto the fires of a raging libido.

If it had been Elladine who had found her all those years ago… If it had been Elle who nursed her back to health, Elle who took her from that awful place, Elle who showed her the delights of the then-nascent twenty-first century… She shivers to think about it.

It is in moments like this that she wonders if there is anything that separates her from Dorothy Marsden beyond a vast gulf in upbringing and what would to an outside observer look like identical private proclivities. And then she must scold herself, because she would never do even to the guilty what Dorothy did to the innocent, and the abuses that she bankrolls, observes and — yes — exploits are not lifelong. Her charges, even those who fail Beatrice Quinn’s purity test, do not suffer as even Dorothy’s favourites once did.

And there is one key thing that sets them apart: their rage, and how they have curated it. Dorothy allowed her rage to be misdirected, transmuted, and even dissolved, choosing instead to work with the kinds of people who mistreated her for the promise of an easy, titillating life. Dorothy looked the horrors of the world in the face, allowed herself to be bargained with, and became an enthusiastic participant.

Elle, though, has never ceased to be angry. Sometimes she thinks she was born when she met Kelly, and born again when Kelly was murdered. Born again into a pure and mournful rage, a rage she refined into a weapon, turned first on Kelly’s killers and then on the greater organisation. She cannot truly arrest the tendency towards depravity among her peers, the so-called betters of Britain, but she can and will strike at it, bloody it, weaken it, raise its cost to the near-insurmountable.

On the side, Dorley Hall, a little engine of resistance against the same tendencies made manifest in the rest of them, in the vast swathe of vicious and thoughtless violence that is contemporary British masculinity. She would, if she could, burn all of it; she must be content merely with coring it from a handful of select beneficiaries per year, allowing them to transcend the brutality that raised them.

And she has a use for those who are beyond even that.

Everyone in their place. No-one ever wasted. Not if Elladine Lambert has anything to say about it.

Shit, though. The bodies. Proof that she and Beatrice did the right thing, that even absent loftier goals, their aim was true. But it’s hard to concentrate on that when the lost potential of those poor, murdered girls clamps itself around Elle’s chest. A reborn horror, a spirit of the old world, a remnant of the monsters buried too deep to return themselves.

They could have been beautiful, each of them. They could have been amazing.

Well. In their names — all of their names, chosen, claimed and rejected all — she will ensure that Henrietta Smyth-Farrow’s desire to reacquire her lost toy will remain frustrated, that her attempt to rekindle her father’s obsession on a new continent will fail, and that Henrietta herself will fucking choke.

Put her in the ground and spit into the hole.

Leaning back in her chair, Elle crosses her hands behind her head and stares upwards. The ceiling, like the rest of her office, has been dressed to not appear to be plain concrete — they’ve tiled it like any other office, and covered the floor with wood panelling; there are even fake windows, with screens behind glass showing the view from the HD cameras positioned roughly where the windows would be, if the elevator to her office — which rather cleverly masks its precise movement by reversing the indicator lights and moving slowly enough that few people notice — took you up as it claims, instead of down. And that’s rather depressing, isn’t it? Hmm. Trapped under concrete and resenting it; rather like Beatrice’s boys. Poor things; at least she can leave whenever she wishes.

Elle’s ping-ponging from identifying too hard with Dorothy Marsden to empathising with Bea’s wayward boys. It’s been a long, long day, clearly. And should she even think of them as boys any more? Young, precocious Stephanie obviously excepted — and Diana excluded — it’s possible that some of them might have made the switch, made the only possible sensible decision. She ought to check in, see how things are going. Beatrice ought to have candids to show her.

She wishes she could just bloody well go home. But she can’t, can she? The family pit is too large and crumbly properly to secure — similar to Stenordale, actually — and her apartments in London, Cairo and Hong Kong are known. Ordinarily, she wouldn’t consider that so important, but with the Smyth-Farrow embryos trying to establish themselves, she’d prefer to leave the risk-taking to the people she pays for just that. Unfortunately, that leaves her various Peckinville facilities, and the bolthole suites she has in each one are little more than adequate.

Home. A concept she long ago abandoned, anyway. Attempting to clean the blood off the family name does rather leave one exposed and alone, and while her more distant — and surviving — relatives are cordial, that is all they are. They are not family. In a way, Beatrice is her family. Maria Lam and Edith and the others. And, with the sole and likely waning exception of Beatrice, they merely tolerate her.

Bloody hell. Bloody buggering fucking hell. She’s getting all too introspective. She should return to her suite, pour herself something strong and colourful, and deaden herself to the world for a while.

First, though, there is an itch she must scratch. Picking up her mobile, she taps through to the entry for Gerry Fields — though she finds it, as usual, through the name that comes first in her contacts list: Bianca.

She calls his work line first. It’s after six, but it’s just possible that—

“Hello?” says a voice, deep and full, and yes, that’s ‘Gerry’. She owes him a bonus for staying so late at the office.

“Gerry!” she exclaims, too loud and too enthusiastic, but she can’t help it: it’s too good to hear his voice. She had him placed in Peckinville Insurance, perhaps the least exciting company in the Peckinville group, after Bianca looked up at her with tears in her eyes and pleaded for nothing more than a normal life. “Elladine Lambert here. Just checking in.”

“Ah! Ms Lambert. Good afternoon.”

“Good evening, more like,” Elle replies, aware that she’s coming on hard with the cheer. But then, she does have some unpleasant news to impart; perhaps a positive attitude will limit its impact. “And do call me Elladine. Or Elle. Call me Elle.”

“O…kay, Elle.”

“How have you been?” She’s leaning on one elbow now, and smiling like an idiot.

“Can’t complain. The girls are doing well.”

“Good,” Elle says. “Good.” The girls, Gerry’s adopted daughters, are of secondary school age now. And they know only who their father is, not who he was briefly and forcibly made into by Dorothy Marsden.

Their father’s on a pub quiz team. It’s all terribly mundane, but he seems to enjoy it, and for a brief, horrible moment, Elle is jealous.

“Gerry,” she continues, “I have some news, I’m afraid. Nothing that will directly affect you or your family, but something for which you should prepare yourself.”

“I’m ready,” Gerry says, sounding more like she remembers him after they finished putting him back together: determined and proud. A good man.

She gives him the overview: bodies at Stenordale, Ms Marsden’s involvement, and so forth. No grisly details, but enough information that when and if it makes its way out to the mainstream media — which seems rather an inevitability, given the number of bodies and the potential for scandal — he won’t be unduly surprised by it. He takes it all in soberly, and with only a few moments where he clearly had to cover the receiver in order to conceal his reaction.

Bianca was never destined for Stenordale. But there’s no reason to believe that the old bastard to whom she was supposed to be shipped would have treated her any better than Crispin Smyth-Farrow, and then Gerry wouldn’t be here today, to attend his pub quizzes and pick up his girls from football.

“Thank you, Ms Lambert,” he says when she’s done, his composure shot.

“We’ll get them, Gerry,” she says. “I promise.”

“That is… good to know.”

“If you would like someone to drive you home…”

“No,” Gerry says. “No, I’ll be fine. Catherine and I are meeting friends tonight. She’s picking me up in about twenty minutes. Enough time to… Well.”

Though he can’t see her, Elle nods anyway. Yes. Enough time for him to wash his face and pretend that everything is fine. Catherine, his wife, knows only what she needs to know, and what she needs to know is not much.

“Be safe, Gerry,” Elle says. And then, on impulse, she adds, “Your bonus this year just tripled.”

“Thank you, Ms Lambert.”

“Elle, please.”

“Thank you, Elle.”

“Any time, day or night,” she says, her finger ready to hang up the call. “If you need anything…”

“I will contact you.”

“Good evening, Gerry. Have a pleasant evening.”

And then Elle carefully lays her mobile phone back on the desk, looks up at her fake little ceiling again, and stops holding it all in. The security staff, if they know what’s bloody good for them, will erase the footage of her crying.

 

2020 January 14
Tuesday

“Are you sitting down? Thought you just went for a slash.”

Well, shit, that’s an unwelcome question at three in the morning. At least there are a hundred answers, most of which stand a decent chance of maintaining the unsteady and unpredictable rapport Raph and the others have developed with Ollie tonight. The guy asked about the girl rules, for fuck’s sake! Maybe when he cut his wrists open, he severed some kind of idiot bullshit line, some bile duct that directed the stuff he should have kept stored in his lower intestine right up and out through his mouth.

Raph could say he was too tired to stand to piss, and that’s true. He could say the way his dick’s been feeling subtly different lately has been freaking him out, so he doesn’t want to have to touch it just to have a slash, and that’s also true.

But he’s getting the feeling that part of the point of the basement is to cut through the lies, to find them wherever they are — mostly inside all their heads — and expose them, ridicule them, end them. Fucking knock them all down like a rotten building, all decaying bricks and shit.

He likes that imagery.

“Yeah, I’m sitting down,” he says through the cubicle door. “So what? And why are you looking, anyway?”

He can just about see one of Ollie’s feet, and that’s all; a relief, because he really didn’t want to look down and see Ollie’s face staring up at him from under the door.

“What are you doing?” Ollie asks. “Trying out how girls piss?” He doesn’t sound belligerent, as Raph might have expected; he’s just confused. Understandable: Harmony and Frankie seem to have teamed up in order to shove as many revolutionary ideas as they can through Ollie’s ears and into his head, and they’re probably running up against the problem that the brain inside is only slightly larger than the ear canal, and absorbs new concepts slowly, with occasional violence.

Raph, very suddenly, wants to go back the fuck to sleep. He was having such a nice night on the mattresses in the common room. He wasn’t lonely for once. Unfortunately, he seems to have woken up his least favourite person in the building when he got up to pee.

“What is there to try out?” he says slowly, so Ollie has more time to digest each single-syllable word. “It’s like shitting, in that you still sit down, but it’s subtly different: you don’t shit. You just do the other thing.”

From out in the bathroom, there’s an exasperated pause, and then Ollie says, “Fuck off, Raph.”

Raph laughs to himself and starts cleaning up, thoughtfully rolling the end of his penis between two fingers as he wipes it. And, yeah, it does feel different — softer, maybe — but right now, with Ollie out there, Raph doesn’t feel so weird about it any more. Because Ollie, when and if he notices the same thing, is going to hate it so fucking much, and that makes Raph kinda like it.

By the time he’s out and washing his hands, Ollie’s in another cubicle. Standing, judging by the sound of the piss stream. Raph declines to comment. He’s almost out of the door before Ollie reappears, and Raph realises that he has a task of utmost importance to accomplish.

“Jesus, Ollie,” he says, pointing at the sinks. “Wash your fucking hands.”

“Yeah, yeah,” Ollie mutters, changing course. “It’s not like I touched anything.”

“Tell me you always wash your hands.”

“…Yeah.”

“Shit,” Raph says, leaning against the locked storage cabinet by the door. “Shit. You’ve been getting your greasy dick juice all over everything for months, haven’t you?”

“Fuck off, Raph. I wash my hands. It’s just…”

Frowning, Raph pushes off from the wall and walks back across the bathroom to Ollie, who is now just standing there, his (unwashed) hands on the sink emplacement. He’s leaning his whole weight on them, and even Raph, who is versed in Ollie’s body language mostly as it pertains to his belligerence, can tell that the weight of the world is suddenly weighing down those chunky — but thinning — shoulders.

Raph doesn’t say anything. Just waits by the sinks. If Ollie’s got anything to say beyond more swearing, it’ll come.

“Frankie,” Ollie says after a while.

“You’re worried about her?” Raph asks. Not exactly news that he likes her; she saved his life, probably, from what Jane says, and the guy visibly perks up when she’s so much as mentioned. A contrast to the grimace that usually crosses Maria’s face at the same time.

“Yeah. No.” With a flourish, Ollie shoves himself away from the sinks and starts walking away from him, towards the far wall. He’s not exactly moving quickly — he’s tired; everyone’s fucking tired! — but it still takes him until he’s passing the door to the shower annexe before he says anything else. “She worked there. At that place.”

“Stenordale?” Raph knows as much as anyone about it now, and he didn’t even have to read it off his sponsor’s phone like Steph. Jane’s just sharing shit now, like they’re friends. “Yeah,” he says. “She was there. And here, too. Before the current lot.”

Ollie’s hit the end and turned around by now, so Raph gets to see his eyebrows briefly move, like some of that is new information to him. But he doesn’t comment. Just says, “Yeah.”

Ollie’s halfway back over to him, and if Raph doesn’t say anything, there’s every chance Ollie will continue right past him and back out into the common room, and the window of opportunity to get something coherent out of him will have been missed. So Raph guesses: “You’re afraid of her, then?”

Raph would be. He thinks he kind of is, actually. She worked here. Here. In the butcher days. Jane said it was ten percent revenge cases or other power play shit, and ninety percent the grim fetishisation of… of something or other. Shit. Raph might listen more than he used to, but sometimes Jane makes him feel like he needs a gender studies degree to participate in the conversation beyond just nodding and going, ‘Yuh-huh.’

“Not afraid,” Ollie says, coming to a stop. “Not scared.”

Something in that pisses Raph the fuck off. “Oh, right, I forgot: Oliver Bradley doesn’t get scared. Why are your wrists still bandaged, Ollie?”

Sneering, Ollie says, “Wasn’t scared. Won’t do it again, though.”

“Oh? How come?”

“Promised Harm. Promised Frankie.”

Of the two of them, Raph gets the feeling that the promise to Frankie is the more important to Ollie, the more vital. He’s getting along with Harmony now, though of all of them, he’s by far the least close with his sponsor, but he’s got something weird going on with that old woman.

Raph gives up. “What’s on your mind, then?”

Ollie’s really close now. And he’s still kind of a scary guy. When it was the three of them, whether it was Ollie, Raph and Declan or Ollie, Raph and Will, Ollie was always the middle guy, the one who was bigger than Raph but not exactly the active threat, the one Raph was careful to laugh along with. But now it’s just the two of them, the followers, and while Raph’s picked a new direction, Ollie’s just kind of fucking wandering, and that makes him dangerous. A man who cuts into himself — out of something other than fear, supposedly — and who throws himself against a concrete wall just to get a rise out of his enemy — which is what he claimed — needs direction or he can be dangerous in his unpredictability.

And, huh: both of them and Declan; both of them and Will. Funny how the biggest ones, each time, are further along than him. Will’s Leigh now, and probably a hair’s breadth from asking them to switch pronouns the way Steph and Bethany did, and Declan’s… hot.

Raph puts thought of Diana aside for tomorrow night, when he’ll be alone in his room again and can feasibly get a hand under the duvet without anyone asking sarky questions about what he plans to do with it, and pays attention to Ollie.

“Worried about her,” Ollie says. “About Frankie.”

“Worried about—?”

“She was there, right? They’re going to want to question her. And if they question her, they could arrest her. And if they arrest her… She could go away for life. She could die in jail.” Ollie’s way too close, and way too intense. But Raph doesn’t push him away; this constitutes maybe the longest thing he’s ever heard Ollie say all at once. “She’s got this laugh. Like my gran.” Ollie smiles suddenly. It’s unsettling. “Fucking dirty laugh, wasn’t it? Proper dirty laugh. Dad always said you couldn’t take her to panto. She’d throw things. Get thrown out. Gran was… good to me. Better’n Mum and Dad.” The smile vanishes, and Ollie turns away, starts pacing again. “Didn’t get it before. Couldn’t… Couldn’t see. But Mum was a cunt and Dad was a bastard. Hope I never see them again. Hope they die.”

Raph blinks, astonished. Back in October, Ollie used to talk about his dad. Not often, but enough that Raph got the impression he idolised him. So where’s this coming from?

“Gran was strong,” Ollie says, stopping quite a distance away by the last toilet cubicle on the row. Far enough that Raph has to strain to hear him. “And she used to protect me. And then she couldn’t.” He’s got his arms folded around himself now. “She went in the home and then it was just me and Mum and Dad. And Frankie… She’s strong. But if they take her, it won’t last.”

“You think you’ll never see her again,” Raph says quietly.

“Like with Gran. One day she was walking around. Talking shit. One day she was my Gran. Suddenly she was sleeping all the time. Forgot who I was sometimes. Went off to a home.”

“Yeah, and how old is Frankie?” Raph asks.

“Sixty-three.”

Raph shrugs. “My gran’s older than that, and she’s still out there fucking shit up. And Frankie seems pretty healthy, Ollie.”

Ollie won’t be persuaded. “So did Gran.”

“Look,” Raph says, risking a step closer, “you’re still a teenager, and—”

“I’m twenty-four,” Ollie says, sullen.

Huh. He doesn’t act like it. “You’re young,” Raph corrects himself, “and the first time you lose someone, it hits hard. Hard enough you don’t get over it for years. But you gotta learn to just enjoy people, Ollie.” Raph doesn’t grimace as he says this, doesn’t call attention to the fact that this is a lesson he fully assimilated only, like, last week. Can’t control everything; can’t control everyone. “Let them be, love them for it, and make the most of the time you’ve got.”

“Queer.”

At this, Raph does not laugh. Nor does he get mad. Nor does he choose to view his equanimous reaction as a measure of how much he’s grown since, yeah, also like a week ago. “Probably. Who really cares, though?”

“Dunno. Think I get it, though.”

“Good. You’re going to lose people. It’s natural. So be a good boy and become a girl like Harmony wants you to, and you can spend all the time with Frankie you want, and anyone else who takes your fancy.”

“Fuck off, Raph.”

“Aw,” Raph says, and extends his arms out. “Bring it in.”

“Fuck off,” Ollie says, having decided that the moment they were enjoying between them is absolutely a hundred percent over. He strides past Raph, ignoring his outstretched arms.

“You’re going to have to learn to hug eventually,” Raph says to Ollie’s retreating back.

“Fuck all the way off.”

 

2020 January 15
Wednesday

Paige links up with Christine as she passes the Student Union Bar, pressing her hand into Christine’s with the kind of finality Christine mostly associates with Indira taking her meekly along to her laser hair removal sessions, way back when. And that’s unexpected, because Paige has a tutorial starting soon, and shouldn’t be on her way back to Dorley at all, but—

“Before you say it,” Paige whispers, “I’m coming with. And that’s final.”

Oh, right. The afternoon shift thing. “No argument here,” Christine replies.

She’d lose, anyway.

The last couple of days at the hall have been tense. Beatrice, Valérie and Frankie returned from Peckinville sans Trevor Darling, and Aunt Bea gave strict instructions that not one resident in the basement be allowed to know where he is or what he’s doing, or they’ll all want to be men again. And when Tabitha opened her mouth to suggest that Beatrice might actually be wrong about that, she got yelled at.

It’s been a theme lately. People questioning Bea; Bea yelling at them. No-one wants to go up to see her any more; it’s been up to Maria and Edy to run interference. Which hasn’t exactly improved their tempers.

Shit. When the new year first began, things really seemed like they were looking up. And now their collective past is literally haunting them, and guys are having their breasts taken out and, shit, maybe Christine should just ask to graduate. Maybe she should graduate herself; the way things are right now, she could probably get away with it.

They don’t dawdle in the kitchen like they might usually; instead they go straight down to the security room. They’re almost the last there, so they quickly drop into a pair of vacant seats at the central tables, with Paige drawing only a couple of raised eyebrows before the pre-meeting chatter resumes. A few moments later, Edy pours them a cup of coffee each, correctly intuiting that if they’re going to be in the basement from 4pm to midnight, they’re going to fucking need it.

Christine immediately takes a long draught from her mug. Finishes half of it before it even occurs to her to check it for incriminating (and bad) jokes. Unfortunately for her, Edy hasn’t been picking the mugs out of the plain cupboard. Christine’s says, in bold, black capital letters, GENERIC FORCED FEMINISATION JOKE MUG, which, okay, whatever. She turns it around just to check; on the back it says FUNNY BALLS REFERENCE.

And to think, she could have come home from her lecture and gone straight to bed and missed this.

Pamela comes rushing in at that point, all apologies and wet hair, the last to arrive. She plants herself next to Christine, shrugs at her, and gratefully accepts a mug from Edy that she groans at before shrugging and sucking down her coffee in ugly gulps. Christine leans around her to check; her mug says I had my testicles removed like any other girl: one at a time. Pamela meets Christine’s eyes and shakes her head in solidarity.

And then Maria’s tapping a teaspoon on the side of her mug — which says One Aunt to rule them all, one Aunt to find them, one Aunt to bring them all, and in the darkness, feminise them, and yeah, that’s Christine’s fill of ‘humour’ for the day; for the entire year, perhaps — to call for attention, and the briefing starts. It’s rough on them downstairs, she says, as the main screen shows an overhead view of the common room. If the sponsors are stressed, she says, then the girls and boys of the basement pick up on it, and that’s not fair. So leave your shit upstairs and put on a happy face.

“Not too happy, though,” Paige whispers to Christine. “I think that would creep them out.”

 

* * *

 

She’s been trying to not touch Steph too much. She’s been trying to rely on Maria less. She’s been trying to be her own person. And yeah, both Steph and Maria have been telling her that it’s still very early for someone in her position to be trying to develop that kind of independence regarding her identity, her personhood, and all that shit, but, fuck it, she was early to choosing new pronouns and a new name, too — as far as she knows, she’s got everyone but the actual trans girls beat — and she’s fucked if Diana is going to keep outstripping her in everything but chest size, and she’s double fucked if Leigh or Raph or, heaven for-fucking-fend, Martin catch up to her.

Has she stood in front of the mirror for what feels like hours every day this week, looking herself in the eyes, working out who Bethany is from first principles? Hell yes she has, and no, it’s not weird. Weird would be letting Maria and Steph continue to do so much of the heavy lifting regarding her personality formulation. Weird would be hesitating at this moment she finds herself in, stalling, going this far and no farther. Weird would be failing to become a woman, and remaining a basement-dwelling creature that subsists by parasitising more complete, enlightened and upstairs personalities.

She tried faking it til she made it; she didn’t make it. If it’s working for Mia, good for her. And it is working for her; Steph says Mia’s been pitching mug ideas, which means that as far as Dorley Hall is concerned, she’s perfectly assimilated and probably counts as a hundred percent ready for the real world, assuming the real world doesn’t mind drinking its tea out of mugs that say on the side, Noblesse Oblige: With Great Fortune Comes the Responsibility to Give Up Your Nob, which was apparently Mia’s latest suggestion.

No, Bethany can’t fake it. But she can find more people to admire, more women from whom to borrow aspects to incorporate into herself. And that’s why when Christine and Paige are among the sponsors who emerge from the corridor at shift change, Bethany sits up straight and smiles right at her.

Paige’s smile is more muted, but at least she comes over.

“Hi, Bethany,” she says.

Shuffling up on the couch, Bethany makes space for her, and Paige sits, throwing a smile at Christine, who’s made a beeline for Steph’s table on the other side of the room.

“Paige!” Bethany says as she finishes rearranging herself, tucking her legs under. “Been a while.” She points towards the ceiling. “How’s life on the outside?”

“Tense,” Paige says, copying Bethany’s pose but looking far better as she does it. She’s not exactly dressed glam; Bethany gets the impression that she’s come straight from lectures, so the jeans and top combo is practical but still, on Paige, hot as hell. “Thankfully, I’m not a sponsor.”

“Mmm-hmm,” Bethany hums, nodding. Shit, she’s being too enthusiastic and coming off strange. “Um,” she continues, fiddling with the material of her jogging trousers, “shit.”

“‘Shit’?” Paige echoes, tilting her head slightly in a manner that Bethany will absolutely be practising tonight in the mirror.

Radical honesty, that’s her best bet. “I don’t know what to say. I think I’m bad at talking to people.”

“I thought you were a chatterbox,” Paige says with a smile. “Though you were quite quiet at the Christmas party.”

“That’s just it! I’m trying to be appropriate and not fall back on, you know, what I always fall back on, but being appropriate is a lot of work. I keep turning to my brain and asking like, hey, give me five potential topics to talk about, but my brain is like, dude, it’s taking everything I’ve got to stop you from just bringing up your— Um. Yeah.”

Paige nods. “Your penis, yes.” She smiles again, this time with the very tip of her tongue poking out between her teeth just for a moment, and, shit, that’s another one for the personality bank. It’s adorable, and does funny things to the thing Bethany’s trying not to allude to.

“Um—”

“I used to have one,” Paige says conversationally. “And I, too, remember it as being quite difficult to not talk about. It was always there. Made it quite difficult to wear certain skirts and trousers while retaining my status as a cis girl.”

“Um…”

“I can show you how to tuck with tape, if you’d like. It presents a flatter profile.”

Bethany tries something: the little head tilt Paige did. “Are you teasing me?” she asks.

Covering her mouth, Paige laughs. “I am,” she says after a moment.

“That’s rude, you know.”

“I’m not a sponsor. I’m allowed to be mean.”

“Um—”

“So, how are you doing, Bethany?” Paige says, leaning away, settling back into the couch cushion.

“No fucking clue,” Bethany replies. Honesty again; it seems to be working so far. The key is to remember that, bar Steph and maybe Leigh and probably Melissa and definitely Maria, every tall, beautiful girl who comes up to Bethany has been where she is right now. Has sat in this same couch, been plagued by the same doubts, has had to construct herself a new personality from scratch, just like Bethany. Many of them have probably also sat in their rooms and watched the same ten or twenty seconds of the episode of Even Quarterbacks Get the Blues with the locker room cheerleader slapfight until every part of their developing body that responds pleasurably to persistent rubbing has become too sore to touch, just like Bethany. “Can I ask you a question?” she says suddenly, racing ahead of her thoughts but not wanting to trip herself up by thinking too much, which has been, in the main, one of her biggest problems, alongside talking too much.

“Shoot.”

“How did you get into clothes?”

Paige blinks at her. “Good question,” she says after a moment’s consideration. “I decided I wanted to be.”

“You… decided?”

A shrug. “The women who get what they want tend to be pretty and to dress well. At least, that’s what I thought at the time. The reality is more complex. But by the time I realised that, I was good at makeup and becoming great, and I’d already got permission to set up an Instagram. And it was — is — fun. I enjoy looking nice for its own sake, and I love to bring out the inner beauty in other girls. That was how it started, though: I wanted to be the kind of girl who could be successful and popular.” She leans out from the cushion and whispers, “And I wanted to be the kind of girl Christine would like.”

Bethany can feel her eyes widening, and the thought that her emotions, her desires, are so readable makes her cheeks flush — which only makes it worse — but, again, she doesn’t want to care about that, and she feels stupid for even thinking about it: she likes Steph; so what? Paige likes Christine.

“Even back then?” she asks quietly.

“Even back then. I saw who she was becoming, and I fell in love. It took her a while to love me back — or to realise that she loved me back, anyway. I’m a good match for her, don’t you think?”

Bethany, who has on a few shameful occasions imagined the two of them together, wearing the dresses they wore at the Christmas party, whenever she couldn’t be bothered to load the right episode of Even Quarterbacks Get the Blues, nods.

“A very good match,” she says.

 

* * *

 

“It’s been fine, I suppose, and better since I haven’t technically been working, just going to lectures and tutorials and all that shit, but, God, Steph, it would be so nice if we could have just one calm month. Just one. When we’re out of the new intake period and the sponsors aren’t too stressed out because their subjects are all cooperating and all the rest of us have to do is study, eat, practise our makeup, and actualise. Like my second year! That was nice. Very calm. Half the time the first-year sponsors were practically fucking Zen, like they were walking on clouds, they couldn’t believe they had such a wonderful intake. Hah. Except for Nell, I guess. Butting heads with Faye from the start. Hmm. No. I’m being unfair. I bet it was a lot less serene than I thought it was.” Christine looks up from her coffee to frown at Steph. “But it seemed pretty fucking serene. Now, this year, the year I’m supposed to be graduating, we’ve got supposedly dead women showing up at our door, we’ve got one of the original torturers living upstairs, and we’ve got a police investigation that might at any moment barge into the kitchen and start asking awkward questions about the mugs. Shit, Steph; I just want to learn about Linguistics.”

She’s still holding Steph’s hand, there on the metal table, between Steph’s phone and the romance book she’s been reading — giving Bethany a little extra space, the way they agreed; not because Bethany wants to be apart from her but because she needs to learn to function without always deferring to someone else — so Steph squeezes it.

“Would they let you move out?” she suggests.

Christine laughs bitterly. “No. No, they— Shit. Maybe? I mean… I don’t know. I could do my job remotely, I suppose?” She sighs. “I’d miss my room. I’d miss Jodie and Julia and Yas. I’d miss the second years.” She looks at Steph again. “I’d miss you.”

“You would?”

“Sure.”

“Really?”

“Steph, are you doing the thing again?”

“The thing?”

“You know,” Christine says, “the thing where you assume that your value rests in what you can do for people, how you can look after them? The thing where you think you’ll only be worth loving as a woman when you pass better, when you’ve had FFS and more time on hormones? The thing where you assume that you, as you are now, are inherently flawed?”

Swallowing, Steph removes her hand. Massages it as she frowns at Christine. “I don’t think so.”

“Sorry. They, uh, updated the psych profiles on all of you today. We went over them upstairs. Pippa refused to write yours, so Maria did it. Is it… not accurate?”

In the relative silence that follows, Steph wants to shout that, fuck no, it’s not accurate, that she knows her value, that it is intrinsic to her, that it has nothing to do with how she chose to stay here in the basement for Bethany’s sake and for Adam’s and the others’. But she can’t. Because, well.

“Yeah,” she says. “It’s accurate. Fuck.” She rests her chin on her hand, leans heavily on it. Glares. “I thought I was above all that, not like the rest of them,” she whines, only half joking. “Do I really have to work on myself, too?”

“Yeah. Afraid so.”

“Fucksake.”

“It happens to the best of us.”

 

* * *

 

Dinner’s got to be served in stages, which is a pain in the arse, but they have no choice: the dumbwaiter at the back of the lunch room was deliberately made too small for even someone Bethany- or Abby-sized to crawl up it to freedom, and the downside of that is that only two plates can fit side by side. Under normal circumstances, the sponsors use the ’waiter only for very hot and very spillable items, and bring the rest down from the kitchen themselves, but they are very much not under normal circumstances, and the big door in the dining hall won’t open again for another six hours, no matter what. It’s not even visible right now, hidden behind bookcases.

They’ve been under lockdown for only a handful of days, and already being closed off from the kitchen is becoming restrictive. Christine, in her head, starts sketching out plans for how one of the small store rooms attached to the fire exit could be retrofitted into a kitchen. Privately, she considers the whole lockdown they’re under to be total overkill, but Beatrice has been running this place since the early 2000s and has yet to get arrested; she must be doing something right.

Even if that something is, currently, mostly sulking and yelling at people.

Leigh, Martin, Tabitha and Pamela have eaten already, so now Steph and Bethany are led into the lunch room by Paige, while Christine waits by the dumbwaiter, waiting to find out what Indira’s going to have sent down to them.

It turns out to be vegetarian cottage pie. Christine remembers the second years cooking up a huge batch of the stuff earlier in the week, presumably for exactly this reason: with dinners split like this until lockdown ends, it’s easier to reheat four portions at a time than it is to continually run, say, a stew, and dole out bowls of it every half an hour until everyone’s been fed.

“Did you pick a movie yet?” Bethany asks.

Christine sets down two plates on one side of the table, and returns to the ’waiter for the next two. “There was an argument about whether The Matrix is too on the nose,” she says. “But Martin hasn’t seen it, so that’s probably going to sway opinion somewhat.”

Bethany leans back in her chair to give Christine room to put down her plate. “Martin? He… expressed a preference?”

Christine shrugs. “He wants to see The Matrix. So we might make a whole thing of it. Keep going with Matrix movies until we run out of movies, we run out of snacks, or the night shift relieves Paige and me. Whichever comes first.”

“Wow.” Bethany’s shaking her head. “This is a revelation. Martin cares about something. Shit. Now I’ve really got to sort my shit out.”

“I mean, we don’t have to watch The Matrix,” Christine says. “We could—”

“Oh, I don’t care what we watch,” Bethany says, waving a hand, and with the other, picking up a fork and starting on her cottage pie. “I just want an excuse to eat popcorn and have Paige braid my hair.”

Next to Christine, Steph lays down her fork. “Um,” she says. “What?”

“Paige is going to braid my hair.”

“She’s going to be very pretty,” Paige says.

“Is there enough to braid?” Christine says.

“Just about. If we weren’t on lockdown I’d fetch a wig.”

Bethany shrugs. “It wouldn’t be my hair. Less fun.”

“Maybe you should ask Maria for extensions.”

“Shit,” Bethany says. “Yeah. You know what? I might.”

“Beth,” Steph says, “you don’t have to do anything you don’t want to.”

“Yeah, but I’m sick of this.” She taps herself on the chest. “I’m choosing to work on myself again, and you know why? I want to be a better person. I want to keep up with you. I want to make Maria happy. But, you know, mainly… Remember when I put on that slutty skirt and danced around in front of Leigh and almost made her head explode? I promise you, Steph, that when I next put on a slutty skirt, it will be because I choose to, and it will be, like, ninety percent to fuck with Leigh. It’s my main route to actualisation.”

Christine mutters, “I’m going to add that to the sponsor handbook.”

“Sorry, Steph,” Bethany says, “but you’re not my main catalyst any more. Leigh’s the new goat, and I’m going to milk her for all she’s worth.”

“Sometimes, Beth, I think you should end everything you say like one sentence earlier.”

“Just one?”

 

2020 January 16
Thursday

Today’s the day that Monica officially told the hall that she won’t be coming home until lockdown is over, until the investigation is wrapped up — or at least confirmed to be pointing very far away from Dorley. Until Diana is safe. She sent the email at eight this morning from her phone, and by three minutes past she was dealing with Indira, deputised by Maria to yell at her.

“Just pretend I’m super mad at you,” Indira said, and then made obnoxiously audible slurping sounds, presumably so Monica would know for certain that Indira is partaking of the excellent coffee available to her at the hall, while Monica is stuck with, for example, supermarket-brand instant granules.

Still, Monica got what she wanted: proper authorisation for the cash Christine transferred to her — and for considerably more besides — and an agreement that she can stay out in Cherston for as long as it takes. She’s still a sponsor, after all, and Diana, no matter how unconventional her journey, and no matter that she already washed out, is still Monica’s responsibility.

She also got a craving for good coffee, which is why, when Indira told her she needs to be briefed by one of Elle’s people, Monica insisted on meeting Isla, the soldier, in one of those coffee shops that draws the little flower in your foam. She’s waiting there now, sipping at something goddamn fucking amazing with caramel in, and browsing online stores for inspiration for when she goes clothes shopping with Diana tomorrow.

Isla, when she shows up almost twenty minutes late, turns out to be dark-skinned, dark-haired, wickedly pretty, and not even all that short compared to Monica. She’s used to cis girls coming up to her shoulders, but Isla, if she stood up on her toes, could probably just about look down on her. And that’s far too hot a concept for Monica to deal with so early on a Thursday morning, especially when they have business to discuss, so Monica settles for a smile and a handshake. Isla orders a coffee, Monica orders another, and they get down to it.

“Everything’s in the bag,” Isla says, nodding at the backpack she slung under the table when she arrived. “Two clean laptops — one for you, one for her — and one clean phone. All her ID, but she can’t leave the country on that passport until next year; it’ll take us that long to get her cleanly inserted into the system. There’s a video message from Ms Lambert saved to the desktop on Diana’s laptop, so make sure she watches it.”

“A video message?”

“Ms Lambert would like to debrief her, personally.”

Monica leans across the table and hisses, “If that chaser bitch thinks she can—”

“No,” Isla says, holding up a hand. “No. It’s nothing like that. Girl scout’s honour.”

“Yeah, well,” Monica says, a little mollified but still horrified at the thought of letting Elle Lambert anywhere near Diana, “some of us weren’t allowed into the girl scouts. Just promise me that if she goes — if — Diana will be unharmed, untouched, and allowed to leave afterwards.”

Isla frowns. “Why would she not be allowed to leave?”

“She was washed out. Marsden took her out of Lambert’s hands, not ours.”

“Ms Lambert has no use for her. I’ve been assured. Besides, that project is being wound down?”

“Oh?” Monica scowls. “The ethical issues finally got to her, then?”

“Maybe,” Isla says, and what bursts Monica’s mood and makes her laugh is that the soldier is very obviously trying not to smile.

“God. Funny business we’re in, isn’t it?”

Isla reaches for her coffee and blows gently on the patterned foam. “Speak for yourself. Until last year I was protecting a CFO. I got drafted into this.”

Monica takes a sip from her own coffee. “Yeah?” she says. “Me too.”

 

2020 January 17
Friday

“Come in!” Maria shouts through the door, and Frankie, failing to disguise her nerves, almost trips as she enters.

Nice in here, though. It would be bad form to note that Maria’s flat used to belong to one of the sponsors from Frankie’s time, so she doesn’t, but Maria’s made far better use of it than Tilly, turning it into a proper studio apartment. She’s got bookshelves, she’s got a lovely set of matching rugs, and she’s done up the kitchen proper. She’s also got herself a large desk, and it’s behind this that she sits, waiting for Frankie.

“Frances,” she says, her voice neutral.

“Sorry in advance for this being weird,” Frankie says, taking the seat that Maria’s girl, Edy, is holding out for her.

“Weird?” Maria says as Edy leaves for the kitchen and starts a kettle boiling. “I wouldn’t call it weird. I might call you stupid for walking into a lockable room with me, but not weird.”

Frankie shrugs. “I’m not here to be best mates, or anything. I just… It’s the lad. Ollie. Oliver. He’s been worrying about me. I want— I need to reassure him.”

“And how will you do that?”

“Dunno. All I know is, he wants to see me, and Harmony said I need to go to you or Beatrice about it. And since Bea’s all… incommunicado, she said it should be you.”

“Remind me to thank her for this opportunity, then,” Maria says. Edy places a mug of tea in front of her. The mug says, I’m not a woman, I’m a hundred coping mechanisms in a tight skirt. “No.”

“No?”

“No.”

Edy sets Frankie’s tea in a blue-and-white mug that says on the side, The Guardian view on mugs: the gender distressed should not be forced to experience ‘jokes’. She’s not sure she gets that one.

“Maria—” Edy starts.

“No,” Maria repeats. “I’m keeping her away from that boy. From everyone I can.” She turns back to Frankie. “The only reason you’re not locked up right now is that Beatrice overruled me. And I’m fairly sure the only reason she did that is because Valérie has this absurd soft spot for you. Which I can’t do anything about, because I can make the clear-headed decision to keep you the fuck away from Oliver Bradley.”

“She did save his life.”

“S’not the point, actually,” Frankie says. “Maria, you’re never going to not hate me. Not asking you to change that. But I’m useful. I’m a tool. So either I can sit around in my room watching telly and eventually die of boredom, or you can put me to use and I’ll die of, I don’t know, a stress-induced heart attack.”

“Don’t try to make me laugh, Frances,” Maria says.

“I can help Ollie, is the point. I get him. And Harmony’ll be with me, right? Ready to zap me if I need zapping?”

“He’s been asking for her, Maria,” Edy says gently, with a hand on Maria’s shoulder. “And he’s still in a delicate—”

“All right!” Maria snaps, ducking out from under Edy’s hand. She stays like that for a moment, contorted and uncomfortable, and then straightens out, sits back in her chair. Pinches the bridge of her nose. “All right, okay?” Without looking at Frankie, she continues, “You can see him. I’ll get it set up. And I’ll make sure Harmony gets authorisation to take you down whenever she sees fit. But remember, you go down there, you’re going down for eight hours. A whole shift.”

“S’fine,” Frankie says readily.

“And if you fuck around,” Maria says, finally looking at her, pointing a finger across the desk, “I’ll kill you. And I’ll bury you a fuck of a lot deeper than Crispin Smyth-Farrow buried all his secrets.”

 

* * *

 

Harmony said he should read, so he’s reading. She said he should try to see himself in the main character, so he’s trying. And he’s doing his best to ignore that he shouldn’t be doing any of this, that he should still be fighting. The voice that’s fucking screaming at him. Don’t listen to the people trying to control you. Fight back.

The others felt like that. For definite. Declan. He attacked Steph in the shower. Will. He attacked Maria right here in the common room. Raph. He was there for all of it, he backed them up.

Look at them all now.

It’s so fucking exhausting. Last one standing. And late at night, he’s started to think that maybe he’s going to fall, too.

Shit. Not even late at night any more. All the time. If there’s a part of him that thinks he’s a pussy for no longer trying to escape, there’s another part that’s just waiting. Waiting for what?

For it to happen.

Fuck, he almost wants it at this point. Feels like in a movie. The bloke walking up the stairs. Haunted attic or some shit. And you’re watching and waiting. Because he’s fucked and he doesn’t know it yet.

That’s the thing, though. Ollie knows it. He’s beyond fucked.

He puts down the book. Can’t see himself in the main character anyway. Doesn’t give a shit about baking.

Not many people around right now. No Bethany, no Steph. Martin’s here somewhere. And Leigh. Still getting used to that new name. And he asked everyone to call him a girl from now on. Another thing to get used to.

Leigh tried to lecture him. Told him about people who don’t care about gender or whatever. Okay. So? Say he’s right, say Ollie’s as flexible as Harmony and Leigh and all the others think he must be. Doesn’t change a thing. Still got no choice in this.

Still letting shit be done to him.

“Hey, Ollie!”

It’s Harmony.

What now?

What’s he not doing that he’s supposed to be doing?

Or is he doing something, but doing it wrong?

“Someone to see you, Ollie,” Harmony says. She’s waiting at the door to the corridor. Better go see what she wants, then.

He dogs the ear of his book, even though he isn’t enjoying it and doesn’t care about losing his place, because that’s just what you do, it seems, or it’s what Steph does anyway, and half the guys in this fucking basement seem to be watching her for their cues on how to behave, even more so than girls like Harmony, which okay, yeah, he understands that they are basically the same, just with more time as girls behind them, and he even gets now that Steph is different in her own way, being transgender from birth or whatever, because he had that shit drummed into him for hours by Harmony and then Raph shouted at him and Leigh called him a prick.

Fucking overthinking everything. Shit.

He drops his book and pushes up, feeling sluggish and slow from the hormones, and drags himself across the room. He doesn’t have the energy for this shit, especially if he’s going to be lectured again, if his visitor is going to be the woman in charge or one of her deputies and they’re going to tell him how it is again, and he knows how it is, that’s the fucking problem.

“Ollie?” Harmony says. She’s waiting for him halfway down the corridor and he’s just standing there in the doorway now.

“Sorry,” he mutters. Follows her.

He doesn’t know if he’s slowing down, if he’s getting stupider, if his body really is getting harder to move around, or if he’s getting faster, quicker, brighter, and his body feels like it’s holding him back. How would he know? Who could he ask, anyway? None of the girls here have stories that sound like his.

Down the corridor. Door. Door. And there’s the cell corridor again. Makes his heart sink. What did he even do? They can’t put him back in here without telling him what he did!

But then—

Ah.

Right then.

“Frankie,” he says quietly.

 

* * *

 

Broken dogs, the sponsors would call them, back in Frankie’s day. Boys who’d look twice around every corner, who’d flinch when you came in the room, who’d eat their food like they were less afraid of choking on it than having it taken away. Boys who’d been made into nothing, who had nowhere to go but up.

Failures, to Dotty’s mind. Her slimy aristo customers didn’t like it when the boys broke too easily; they preferred to do that themselves on their grand old estates in the middle of nowhere, places where the screams could echo for a dozen rooms without being heard by a single other soul. When you break a man such that the mere sight of your raised hand is enough to bring him to heel, when you take someone who was once like you — dignified, male — and you reduce him, layer by layer, take his manhood and his masculinity… it is a unique pleasure. Or that’s what old Dotty used to say anyway. Frankie could never get into it. Probably why she wasn’t as good at riding the line as the rest of them.

Ollie’s not there yet, but he reminds her of Karen’s boys. The ones who walked closest to that line, who provided the clients of Dorothy’s Dorley with more satisfaction than challenge. He’s walking like he doesn’t fit into his body, like it hangs poorly off a mind that doesn’t know who or what it is. And when he sits next to her on the couch set up at the end of the corridor, he tries out three ways to sit before he hits on one that seems comfortable.

And then he just sits there, staring at his lap.

Harmony might lose him. She’s talked to the girl about him at length, and she’s backed way off from how she was before, treating him with kindness, letting the others — Leigh and Raph, mainly — provide behavioural corrections, but she’s worried. And she’s right to be.

The problem with most of the younger sponsors here is that they’re just that: young. Even the older ones have got, what, two or three transitions under their belt? And the senior sponsors might have overseen more than that, but Frankie…

Frankie’s seen hundreds be reborn only to die, to be used and discarded. Her past is painted with death, her road to hell obscured by the bodies that litter it, and maybe she can actually fucking use that for once. Like she did with Diana, briefly; like she should have done with Diana from the start.

She can help him.

But she needs to set the scene first.

“Hey, Harmony,” she calls to the girl fidgeting with her phone and her taser halfway back up the corridor, “you couldn’t get us a cuppa, could you, love?”

“I shouldn’t—”

“You fancy a tea, don’t you, Oliver?” Frankie says to Ollie, cutting Harmony off. He doesn’t say anything, but nods slowly. “Milk and sugar?” she says to Harmony.

“I need to watch the two of you,” Harmony says.

Frankie forces a laugh. “He’s not going to attack me,” she says. “Are you, Oliver?” Ollie silently shakes his head. “There you go.”

“Maria said—”

“Maria’s not here, is she?”

Harmony stares at her for a moment, chewing on her lip. Go on, Frankie silently urges her, take the bloody hint. Give the lad a break from you and from the boys and girls he’s obliged to spend all his time with.

“Milk and sugar,” Harmony says, to which Frankie grins. “Fine.” And she turns on her heel and marches off. Frankie doesn’t know if she’s genuinely annoyed, or if she’s playing it up for Ollie, trying to make him feel like he — or someone acting on his behalf — has got one over on her. She thinks it’s probably the latter.

“Much better,” Frankie says, settling back with her hands folded behind her head. There’s a little table in front of the sofa, and she puts her feet up on it, crossed at the ankle. Not only is it a comfortable position, something she can keep up for hours, it’s also open. Ollie can see her, see that she’s not armed, see that she’s relaxed around him. Like the old days, playing good cop to Karen or Tilly’s bad cop. Only even back then, she meant it. “How’ve you been, Oliver?”

He shrugs. She waits. Eventually, in the absence of anything else to break the silence, he says, “Bored.”

“No good books in the basement?”

That makes him laugh. “Nah. Reading this one about baking. And lesbians.”

“Right,” Frankie says. “Boring. You got anything you’d rather read?”

“Dunno,” Ollie says. He slips back into silence, so Frankie waits for him again. She’s seen the footage of him laughing to Raph in the bathroom; she knows he’s capable of speaking his mind when he wants to. But he’s been so moulded by the lifelong dominance game of masculinity that stepping outside it seems to confuse him.

No, that’s wrong. He’s not confused. He’s just not Ollie. He’s Oliver, maybe. He’s whoever he was when he was with his gran.

“I used to read sci-fi and fantasy,” Frankie says. “The classics. Library had a whole section on ’em, and when I was a girl, I’d start at one end and work my way along. And some of it— Hell, a lot of it was crap. But the good ones really opened my mind.”

“Who did you like?” he asks.

The question surprises her. So she segues from her lie — about reading anything at all — to a truth, one she finds easily, but in an uncomfortable place. “Le Guin,” she says, pulling a name out of her memory. They had a lad down here once. Loved Le Guin. She got him some. He was so grateful, he actually fucking hugged her. Dead now. “Ursula K Le Guin, that was her name. She was good. You want me to get you some Le Guin books?”

He shrugs again, so she takes that as a yes. She’s about to move on, to think up something else with which to engage him, when he says, very suddenly, “I’ve been worrying. About you.”

Oh, she remembers this. It was on the video. But she asks him about it anyway because he mustn’t think she’s been spying on him, and he spools out with staccato lucidity all the nonsense he’s worried about: that Frankie’s old, that she’ll get caught, that she’ll die in jail. She thought Raph dealt with it fine, but if Ollie’s still worrying, then clearly another approach is required. Outright rejection, maybe.

“Bugger that, Oliver,” she says. “Nobody’s catching me. And if I think they’re going to, I’ll be at my throat with the nearest bit of cutlery before you can say boo. No, I’m dying on my feet, me. I’d prefer a long time in the future, but if it comes earlier, it comes earlier. Done too much with these hands to let anyone else take that away from me.”

“You’d…?” Ollie, his eyes wide, can’t say it.

“Yep,” Frankie says, popping the P. She unclasps her hands from behind her head and slices a finger across her throat, cackling.

Dirty laugh, Ollie said to Raph, days ago. Dirty laugh, like his gran. Well, she’s not above using that, is she?

“You wouldn’t let them take you?”

“Like you,” Frankie says. It’s a risk, but she’s going somewhere with this, and if he can’t follow, there’s basically no point; they might as well wash him out tomorrow. “Except the difference is, prison’d be the end for me. But this? It’s not the end for you, Oliver.”

He shrugs again. Good. Time was, someone like Ollie would have lunged for her at even the thought of it. But there’s enough between them — or borrowed from his gran — and he’s made enough slow, grudging progress, that he just sits there. Doesn’t even glare. Just looks empty.

Oliver Bradley doesn’t know what he’s going to do with himself.

“You were here,” he says, and it’s sudden again, the way half his thoughts seem to come out. Like if he didn’t spit them at the moment of ideation, he might claw them back, keep them to himself. “Before Aunt Bea. You were here.”

“Yeah,” she says simply. “Seen a lot of people come and go.”

“What was it like?”

Well, shit. That’s a hell of a question. “It wasn’t good, Ollie. It was violent and coercive and— Hah, yeah, stop nodding, because I don’t mean that it was violent like Monica hitting Declan with a nightstick, or like Will going for Maria, or—”

“Diana,” Ollie says. “And Leigh.” Says the names like bloody tombstones. With finality.

“Diana,” Frankie agrees. “And Leigh.”

“Harmony said to be careful about it.”

“Good. Good. She should have. And so should you.”

Ollie asks, “So why didn’t you?”

“Because…” Okay, yeah, he’s got her with this one. But she can turn it around. “Because that’s how I think, Oliver. Because that’s what this place made me. Me and the other sponsors of my life, we came in two groups. There were those like Karen, the nurse. Sadistic. Killed for it, in the end. Missed by no-one. And then there was me. You know what I got good at, Ollie? Drawing lines. Lines between someone’s past and their future. Lines between the things I wanted to do and the things I let myself do, because if I stepped over that line, I would’ve been killed. So that’s how I think: Diana, when Monica had to hit her, she was Declan then; and Leigh didn’t go for Maria, that was Will. That was before they crossed that line. The line that’s still in your future, Oliver.”

“Yeah,” he says.

“Now, I won’t say I never crossed that line myself. For the boys. Had to, for discipline. To remind them I was in control. But sometimes… Sometimes, even I couldn’t bring myself to do it.”

“With Aunt Bea?” Ollie asks.

Who told him she used to sponsor Beatrice? Interesting. Anyway. “No,” she says. “Not with Bea. With someone else. Someone who almost got out.”

And she gets it. In the way he’s sitting forward all of a sudden, invested, listening like an eager student. In the questions he’s suddenly asking. Ollie needs a route out of here. He’s worked out that he’s not leaving here as Oliver Bradley, whether or not he’s okay with that, but he needs to know how to leave. He needs a map. And none of the girls here can give it to him. Not even Maria.

So she tells him the story of a girl who came from violence, who hurt people in her former life, who flowered right here under Dorley. Who helped the other girls with their makeup and coached them on how to behave just right so the visitors wouldn’t punish them so readily. Who asked Frankie for books and read them cover to cover, because they were the books she read when she was a child, before she grew up, before she grew violent. Who found in herself something complex, something new, something real, and very different from her life before.

And then she was taken from this place as they all were.

“What happened to her?” Ollie asks.

“She’s… Shit.” Frankie’s got to wipe her face on her sleeve. She’s not faking these tears. Nor is she faking the tense, dry feeling in her throat. When Harmony eventually decides they’ve talked enough and shows up with the tea, she’s going to drink it right away, no matter how hot it is. The hotter the better, actually. Let her scald herself. “She’s why we’re here, Oliver. She’s why we are all here, why the hall no longer belongs to Dorothy. She’s why I got to get away from this place. She’s why Valérie is free and why Beatrice has the luxury of locking herself in that nice office upstairs. She was a right bastard kid, Ollie, but in here, in this fucking place, she became a perfect, innocent, beautiful flower. She picked her name, Kelly, because it would have been her sister’s. She told me that. Weeks before she was taken away, she told me that. Shit, I wasn’t even her sponsor. I just took a liking to her. But it was after Beatrice, you see, and we were locked up good and tight. No chance of a nice girl like her getting out.” She wipes her nose again. Sniffs noisily. Feels the sting of everything she’s done in her eyes, in her chest. “She was taken away, and Elladine Lambert fell in love with her. For that crime, for being someone who could be loved, she was murdered, and Lambert, she rose up against this place. This new Dorley? If there is a grave on which it is built, Ollie, it is hers.”

 

2020 January 18
Saturday

Amazing how little she owns, really. Melissa’s little computer and her laptop are both boxed up and ready to be dragged to the lift. Most of her clothes have gone to the charity shop in batches, day after day this week. And what else is there? Her pots and pans aren't coming with her, since she won’t need them while she’s staying at the hall, and when they finally do the thing they’ve been talking about and find a place in town for the three of them, they’re going to want to get all new stuff. So her kitchenware is in a box in the post room on the ground floor with a note attached that says for people to take as they need. It’s probably empty already.

Most other things came with the flat. At least it’s not much to lug down with her, though of course Mr Bakhash from the corner apartment helps her with the computer box as soon as he sees her stagger out of her door with it. They’re going to miss her here, he says, and when she says that she didn’t really do much while she was here, he says that’s the point! Some tenants have music on at all hours, put their trash out at the wrong time, are in and out with crashing doors, but Melissa? She respected the building.

“It’s nice to be missed,” she says with a smile, waiting for the elevator doors to close.

“Safe drive, Miss Haverford,” he says, and gives her a little wave.

It kind of is nice to be missed. She’s told him about her little box of kitchen stuff; she hopes he picks out something useful for himself.

Melissa’s going home. She’s got a job lined up at Saints, and she’s going to live at the hall for a bit. She’s going to visit Steph a lot and she’s going to finish reconnecting with Nell and the others from her intake. She’s going to put back together the life she should have started building when she first graduated.

No more running, no more hiding.

And if she’s putting her family back together, well there’s someone else very important to her she needs to see. Aunt Bea said she could contact Jenny, right? Tabitha was working on that, so the first thing Melissa’s going to do when she gets back — when she gets home — is talk to Tabitha and get the ball rolling.

The best time to fix her life passed by years ago, but the second-best time is right now.