Shiv realizes immediately that the re-creation of the villa’s interior is virtual rather than actual. That what she is seeing isn’t a room furnished and decorated to resemble the lounge in Kyritos but photos of the original, enlarged to life-size and projected onto the floor and walls of an otherwise bare room. The clinic must have downloaded the images from the holiday company’s website.
What doesn’t happen so fast, or for several minutes, is the steadying of her breathing, or the return to a regular beat of her thump-thump-thumping heart.
Or the lessening of the urge to hammer on the door and scream to be let out.
They won’t let her out though. For four hours, Shiv is stuck here with … whatever this is. A psychological experiment. Her very own Room 101. Trapped inside – enveloped by, taken back to – the place where her brother lived his last days.
Well, they can lock her in but they can’t make her look.
With nowhere to sit but the floor, she settles down in a corner, cross-legged, tips her head back against the wall and closes her eyes. She’ll keep them closed the whole four hours, if necessary.
But her eyes have been shut for just seconds when an unbearably loud buzz breaks the silence, insistent, drilling into her ears – right into her brain, or that’s how it feels. The moment she opens her eyes again the noise stops. She closes her eyes once more. The noise kicks back in. Opens them. The noise stops.
So, they can make her look. And if they know when she opens and closes her eyes, they must be observing her.
There are several bug-eye lenses set into the ceiling – projecting the images that fill the room. Any one of them could house a camera to spy on her – not just to ensure she keeps her eyes open but to monitor her behaviour, her reactions. She feels like a laboratory rat.
When she has calmed a little Shiv studies the photomontage more closely, picking out details she missed at the first, shocking sight. The flat-screen TV in one corner, the books – some Greek, some English – lining the shelves, the framed print of an old woman in traditional costume hanging on the wall. She can almost picture her father at the wood-and-glass coffee table, a map spread clumsily across it as he plotted their route to the fort. Can almost see Mum’s postcards propped on the mantelpiece. Dad’s Stieg Larsson novel wedged down the side of a cushion. Dec’s stinky flip-flops and sodden swimming shorts strewn about the place and the regular trails of biscuit crumbs he left across the floor.
Can almost feel the ceiling fan losing its battle against the heat of a new day.
Can almost smell the suntan lotion she’s massaging into her skin.
Can almost hear the thud-thud of the tennis ball against the wall outside.
How long it is before the pictures change, she isn’t sure. But after she’s been adjusting to them, making them less upsetting, the room plunges into darkness and, an instant later, the walls and floor light up again. She’s outside, on the patio, gazing through the dangling vines at the pool, shimmering beneath a perfect Mediterranean sky. And at the olive grove and the bay and the pinkish hills, blurred by heat haze.
The pool is hard to take, with its springboard and the unbidden image that fills her head: Declan, in his red swimming shorts, performing a clownish, acrobatic leap, soaking the patio’s pink-and-white flagstones with a great plume of water. Another one: Dec, sitting cross-legged at the end of the board, shirtless, head bowed, mottled in the pool lights, the night he caught her with Nikos.
Instinctively, she shuts her eyes. The appalling buzzer snaps them back open.
For the rest of the morning – apart from a five-minute “loo break”, which Assistant Hensher escorts her to and from – Shiv is confined to her Personal Therapy Unit. Throughout this time, the projections cut back and forth between the inside and outside of the villa. Boredom should have set in; the images should have lost their power to upset her. Both of these things do happen, somewhere around the middle of the session. But the picture show regains its intensity – its hold over her – as the sheer monotony of sitting for so long staring at the same scenes acts like a kind of water torture.
Or it may be that, however hard she tries to resist it, Shiv’s imagination takes over – filling in the gaps, scripting the story that the pictures leave untold. Resuming the countdown of the days, hours, minutes to Declan’s death.
For the next few days, the projections remain the same.
Shiv starts to believe she can handle it. The mornings become an exercise in forcing her mind to look away, even if her eyes can’t.
Then a whole new set of images appear.
At first, Shiv can’t understand how the clinic obtained them. She has never seen them before, or even known they existed. But it dawns on her that, of course, the photos must have come from the files of the police investigation. From Dad’s lawyer out in Kyritos. Which means that Dad arranged for them to be copied to Dr Pollard.
That he has agreed to let the clinic use them.
The first is a shot of the place where Declan died. Several shots. A sequence of digitally sharp photographs from every angle, super-enlarged – a relentless slideshow that lasts the full four hours.
The next day, a different slideshow: the place where Dec’s body was found. She knows it’s the place because his body is right there in the pictures, covered in a blue tarpaulin sheet. The sequence of images stops at the one where a Greek police officer is about to pull the sheet away.
She finds Caron next door, in her bedroom. It’s lunchtime, but neither one can face eating. Shiv came up here to be by herself for a bit, before Talk, but heard sobbing as she passed Caron’s door and couldn’t just walk on by. She knocked and, after a moment, the older girl let her in.
They’re sitting at opposite ends of the bed, struggling for words. Caron looks as though she might start crying again.
“It was Mel,” she manages to say. “Just after she collapsed.”
Thinking she was fooling around, a guy at the party had carried on filming Melanie on his phone, Caron explains. The clinic must have got hold of the footage and produced stills from it. In the first few days of Phase 2, the images of Mel at the party before she took the pill – laughing, dancing, singing along to a song – have hit Caron hard enough. Today, she’s pale and shaky, eyes underscored by dark shadows, hair hanging limp and greasy. “How about yours?”
Shiv tells her about the latest pictures and Caron puts a hand to her mouth as though she’s about to vomit.
“How can you bear to…” But she can’t finish the sentence.
“I guess it was always going to come to this,” Shiv says.
“Come to what?”
“Just – death.”
Melanie and Declan, dying. For thirty days they were brought back to life; now they’re being brought back to death. But she can’t find a way to say this that wouldn’t sound brutal. She studies Caron. Where’s the sassy girl in the scarlet dress? The girl who stashed cigarettes in her knickers?
“I don’t know if I can face Talk and Write this afternoon,” Shiv says.
“No,” Caron says, after a moment. “Me neither.”
The afternoon sessions have continued as before, with the difference that each resident is required to speak – no exceptions – and to read out what they have written. They must speak and write about the death, nothing else. As Assistant Sumner puts it, they have to “sift the psychological rubble” created by the morning picture shows. Talk and Write strayed into this terrain in Phase 1, but never with such intensity.
Sumner probes, digs. Insists on details, however gory. Where did they die, exactly? What happened, exactly? Tell me how, exactly, it was your fault.
“Will you write me a note to say I’m sick?” Shiv asks, hoping to tease a smile from her friend. To conjure up a flash of the old Caron.
Caron lets the remark go. Talks about something else but stops at the sound of feet scuffing along the corridor. The footsteps pass Caron’s door and halt outside Shiv’s. Silence. As though the person is listening, trying to figure out if Shiv is in her room. Then, the familiar rat-a-tat-tat of knuckles on wood.
“Mikey,” Caron says, her voice flat.
“He’ll be wondering why I’m not at lunch.” Shiv wants to find out how he is after this morning’s PTU, but not if it means making Caron feel abandoned.
“That’s nice of him.” Toneless, again.
Shiv can all too easily imagine the shots of the river where Mikey’s sister drowned, the muddy bank where her body was dragged ashore. He has taken surprisingly well to Phase 2; the tougher line. Like, finally, the clinic gets the point. Call it treatment but, to Mikey, the pictures are a form of punishment. She wonders if today’s images will be enough, or how much further he needs to go before he finds the right kind of tree, the right way to bash his head against it.
She turns to Caron. “Don’t be like that.”
“I’m not being like anything.”
Rat-a-tat-tat next door. “Shiv?” Mikey calls.
Her eyes flick towards the sound, then back to Caron. “I should—”
“Yeah,” her friend says, “you don’t want your little brother to worry.”
Shiv glares at her. “He’s not my brother.”
“Whatever you say, Shiv.”
The images undergo another change. Still, the slideshow of death, but gradually some living versions of Declan appear in the mix. More holiday photos, overlaying the ones of him beneath that tarpaulin, so that she can see the living brother through the outline of the dead one, or the dead brother through the living.
It doesn’t stop at photographs.
On Day 40 or 41 (she’s losing track), the moving images start to appear. She’d forgotten about the clips Mum filmed with her phone in Kyritos.
Declan, dancing in manly Greek-style with a waiter at their local taverna.
Declan, performing handstands on the beach.
Declan, doing a backflip off the springboard.
The clinic has chosen ones that show her brother at his most energetic, most vital. Look how alive he is! How happy! She didn’t mind the night-time picture shows in her bedroom but these moving images of the life she snuffed out are unbearable, especially right after the days of death shots.
With them comes sound. Dec talking, shouting. Laughing.
Hearing his voice shocks Shiv into the revelation she will never hear him speak again. Never hear his silly jokes, his clever riffs, his witty sarcasm, his funny accents, his stupid yodel-singing. Never hear his voice break from boy’s to man’s. Never hear him at the end of a phone, pretending to be the answering machine. Never hear him shout at her to hurry up in the bathroom. Never hear him say her name.
Of course, she hasn’t heard his voice in all the months since the night he died, except in her dreams and her imagination. But it has taken till now – taken this, Declan yelling, “Watch and weep, Shivoloppoulos!” as he backflips into the pool – to lay it bare for her.
She has condemned her brother to eternal silence.