TWENTY-SIX

It was Tuesday when I woke up. The light was washed out like thin, pale smoke and I couldn’t tell if it was dusk or dawn. My phone read 06:03 and I put it down before snatching it back up again to see what day it was. I had no recollection of anything from the previous evening, was uncertain if it had been light or dark when I got home. I touched my stomach and felt an almost imperceptible ache.

I cracked the bedroom door slightly, casting a slice of grey light into the blacked-out living room. Odile’s bedroom door was closed. Did that mean she was here or not? I shut my door and stood in the middle of my bedroom, rubbing my stomach and struggling to recall something. My legs folded like wet noodles when I remembered my plan to meet Helena, and I flopped onto the bed. The pain struck as soon as my body hit the mattress. My pelvic floor clenched, trying to keep the pain out or keep something else in. It felt the same as yesterday, but was more tolerable this time, like the feeling of inadequacy or loneliness; a pain that I had lived with my whole life.

I reread Helena’s messages to confirm that we were meeting. The weight of the phone in my hand, the promise of a new woman to take care of me, reminded me of Natalie’s email. If I cast my mind back to arbitrary points from within our friendship, I could recall specific moments of tenderness and understanding from her. She had touched upon my childhood so many times, almost always accidentally, and had dealt with it with such grace that I had never felt I owed her an explanation. I realised, in hindsight, that she had been trying to coax me through life with such subtlety that I had found her support easy to ignore. She had made good on her promises to help me with my writing by introducing Cara’s poetry to her colleagues at the publishing house. I had assumed this step up would not be extended to me, but it had been offered multiple times and I had never tried to take it. I should have known that Natalie would be there for me. I didn’t blame her for needing some time away from me. In the meantime, I would connect with Helena.

My new thirst for Helena didn’t strike me as odd. I don’t remember thinking about anything apart from how much I wanted her. I didn’t know if I wanted her to fuck me or mother me; if I wanted to give her everything or take everything that she had.

s

Since the ritual, I had become more certain that Owen had been replaced by something else growing inside me. I didn’t feel cleansed; not better or worse, only different. Maybe what was growing inside me was not something physical, but a void; maybe removing Owen had torn a hole in me and now a vast emptiness grew inside. Regardless of whether the absorbing had been reversed or totally completed, the result was the same. I was stagnating.

I took a handful of paracetamol and ibuprofen and lay in bed until the light became something tangible and opaque; a light that I could trust to hold me up. The pain didn’t seem to respond to the pills, but the action of taking them was comforting, as if I still had some control over my body.

I waited through the creaking sounds of Odile’s mattress, through the unapologetic clang of her bedroom door opening. I waited through the silent minutes she spent in the bathroom. I waited until I heard her fill the kettle and I could hear it begin to boil. When I was certain that she would be in a receptive awakened state, I got out of bed, wrapped the mysterious ceremonial bathrobe around myself, and opened my door.

Odile had already set two mugs out on the kitchen counter.

‘Good morning,’ she said, ‘how are we feeling today?’ I found it odd, her use of the inclusive plural, and I wondered again what she knew that I didn’t. I wondered if I should tell her about the pain. I wanted to ask her what had happened to me. I knew she would know, but all I said was, ‘I’m okay thanks, you?’

The accusations against my birth parents had mostly been pretty typical satanic-panic bullshit, but there had been one thing that stood out, one glimmering sentence that I had clung to. I found the article on a paranormal forum. It was a scanned page from an old mystery magazine in a thread about satanic ritual abuse, posted without comment. I had found it perhaps a year before I absorbed Owen. I can still recall the stiffness of my cold thumb as I scrolled through pages of search results on my phone. When I think about the article, I can feel the pain in my coccyx; a reaction to the cold tiles of the bathroom floor at work.

At first, I had only read about my birth parents’ case, but as I made my way through the literature on them, I’d moved on to the panic, and satanic abuse in general. I had been on this particular forum before, had already scoured this thread. But this post was new.

There was no date on the magazine article, but it had clearly been written years after the scandal. It referenced the death of my birth mother, the disappearance of my birth father, the fact that I had been adopted, and that I had taken on a new identity. There were quotes from ‘inside sources’ and ‘close personal friends’. There was also a quote from a woman who claimed to have been working at the day-care centre when my birth parents were taken away.

‘She is not possessed,’ said the quote, ‘she is pure brilliance.’

The article went on to ruminate on my whereabouts, with references to other girls my age who had experienced paranormal phenomena. How did they know that one of those girls wasn’t me?

I had always assumed the quote was fake, but now I wasn’t sure. Could it have been Odile who had provided the quote? Didn’t her face seem familiar? Like someone I had known in a previous life?

As I tried to recall her face from my past, I was aware of Odile’s voice, an indecipherable purring murmur that lulled me as I drank the bitter herbal tea she had handed me. I didn’t know what flavour it was supposed to be, or whether it was part of the ritual or some new spell, but I drank it all the same. When I set the mug down, empty, on the counter, the screwdriver in my abdomen reeled. I gasped. The blood drained from my face. I doubled over, and Odile smiled with sympathy. She knows about the pain, I thought, but instead of confronting her, I hobbled back into my room to suffer in peace.

I rolled around on my bed, trying not to make a sound. It felt like I had been skewered through the cervix with white-hot electrical wire. I gagged like the wire was rising up in my throat. I tried to count my breaths, but I couldn’t count more than two before the ragged gasps became indistinguishable from one another. I focused on my heartbeat instead, trying to count along to the rhythm with which the blood pounded against my temples like it was trying to escape.

That was when I heard it. The comforting one-two of my heartbeat was unsteady, juddering with no rhythm that I could discern. I tried to focus more closely on the calamitous pulse. It was not calamitous, as such. It was not a single pulse at all.