I AM THE one with the big white head and the doll hands. I work behind the desk in the West block of Gruut Huis. When I’m not taking delivered medicines upstairs to the residents who slowly die in their beds, I watch the greenish screens of the security monitors that cover every inch of Gruut Huis’s big red brick walls and its empty tarmac forecourt.

I watch out for deliveries and for intruders. Deliveries come every day. Intruders not so much anymore. They have mostly died out there in the draughty buildings of the dead city, or are lying still on the dark stones before the Church of Our Lady. In Brugge the dying shuffle and crawl to the church. It’s like they have lost everything but a memory of where to go.

Last Christmas I was sent out with two porters to find the baboon child of Mr. Hussain who lives in the east wing. The baboon boy escaped from his cage and blinded his carer. And as I searched for the boy in Guido Gezelleplein, I saw all of the wet stiff bodies beneath the tower, lying down in the mist.

One of the day porters, Vinegar Irish, beat the baboon boy when we found him feeding amongst the bodies. Like the residents, the baboon boy had grown tired of the yeast from the tanks in the basement. He wanted meat.

At ten in the morning, there is movement on the monitor screens. Someone has arrived at the GOODS AND SERVICES entrance of Gruut Huis. Out of the mist the squarish front of a white truck appears and waits by the roller gate. It’s the caterers. Inside my stomach I feel a sickish skitter.

With my teeny fingers I press the buttons on the security console and open Door Eight. On the screen I watch the metal grill rise. The truck passes into the central court of Gruut Huis and parks the rear doors by the utility door of the service area. Behind this utility door are the storage cages for the residents’ old possessions, as well as the porter’s dormitory, the staff room, the stock cupboards, the boiler room, the workshop, the staff washroom, and the yeast tanks that feed us with their yellow softness. Today, the caterers will need to use the staff washroom for their work.

Yesterday, we were told a delivery of food was arriving for the Head Residents’ Annual Banquet. Mrs. Van den Broeck, the Head Resident of the building, also informed us that our showers were to be cancelled and that we were not allowed into the staff room all day because the caterers needed to use these areas to prepare the banquet. But none of the staff ever want to go into the washroom anyway if the caterers are on site. Despite the sleepiness of the white ape, who is night watchman, and the drunkenness of Vinegar Irish, and the slow movements of Les Spider, handyman, and the merry giggles of the two cleaning girls, we can all remember the other times when the little white truck came to Gruut Huis for the banquets. None of the staff talk about the days of the General Meetings and Annual Banquets. We all pretend they’re normal days, but Vinegar Irish drinks more cleaning fluid than usual.

Using the desk phone I call Vinegar Irish, who is the porter on duty in the east wing. He takes a long time to answer the phone. On the security console, I switch to the camera above his reception desk to see what he is doing. Slowly, like his pants are full of shit and he can’t walk straight, I see him stumble into the green underwater world of the monitor screen. Even on camera I can see the bulgy veins under his strawberry face. He’s been in the key cupboard drinking fluids and not beside his monitors like he is supposed to be at all times. If he was behind his desk he would have heard the alarm sound when I opened the outer gate, and he would have known a delivery had arrived. His barking voice is slurred. “What you want?”

“Delivery,” I say. “Watch my side. I’m going down.”

“Aye. Aye. Truck’s come. What you need to do—” I put the phone down while he is speaking. It will make him go shaky with rage in the east wing. He’ll call me a bastard and swear to punch his trembly hands at my big head, while spit flies out of his vinegar mouth. But he won’t remember the altercation tonight when we finish the day shift, and I have no time right now for a slurred lecture about all the things I already know about our duties that he cannot manage to do.

As I walk across the lobby to the porter’s door, with my sack-cloth mask in my doll hands, the phone rings behind my desk. I know it is Vinegar Irish in a spitting rage. All the residents are still asleep. Those that can still walk never come down before noon.

Smiling to myself, at this little way I get revenge on Vinegar Irish, I stretch the brownish mask over my head. Then I open the airlock and duck through the escape hatch to the metal staircase outside. As I trot down the stairs, the mist rushes in to cover my little shiny shoes. Even with the mask pulled over my fat octopus head, I can smell the sulphur-rust of the chemical air.

At the bottom of the staircase, I enter the courtyard. The courtyard is right in the middle of all four blocks of flats. The residents can look down and into the courtyard from their kitchen windows. I bet their mouths fill with water when they see the white van parked by the utility door. What the Head Residents don’t eat, we porters deliver up to their flats in white plastic bags.

Seeing the caterer’s truck makes my stomach turn over with a wallop. The two caterers who came in the white truck are standing by the driver’s door, talking, and waiting for me to open the utility area. Both of them are wearing rubber hoods shaped into pig faces. The pig faces are supposed to be smiling, but they look like the faces in dreams that wake you up with a scream.

The caterers are wearing rubber boots to their knees too, and stripy trousers tucked into the tops of their boots. Over their stripy trousers and white smocks they wear long black rubber aprons. They are both putting on gloves made from wire mesh.

“Christ. Would you look at the cunt’s head,” the older caterer says. His son giggles inside his rubber pig mask.

I clench my tiny hands into marble hammers.

“Awright?” the father says to me. Under the mask I know he is laughing at my big white head and stick body. The father gives me a clipboard. There is a plastic pen under the metal clasp that holds the pink delivery note to the clipboard. With my doll hands I take the pen and sign and print my name, then date the slip: 10/04/2152. They watch my hands in silence. The world goes quiet when my hands go to work, like no one can believe they have any use.

On the Grote and Sons Fine Foods and Gourmet Catering sales slip, I see I am signing for: 2 livestock. Extra lean, premium fresh. 120 kilos.

The caterers go into the cabin of their truck and drag their equipment out. “Let’s get set up. Give us hand,” the father says to me.

From behind the two seats in the dirty cabin that smells of metal and floor bleach, they pass two big grey sacks to me. They are heavy with dark stains at the bottom and around the top are little brass holes for chains to pass through. Touching the sacks makes my legs shake. I tuck them under my arm. In my other hand I am given a metal box to carry. It has little red numbers by the lock. The box is cold to touch and is patterned with black and yellow stripes.

“Careful with that,” the fat father says as I take the cold box in my small hand. “Is for the hearts and livers. We sell them, see. They is worth more than you are.”

The son hangs heavy chains over one arm and grabs a black cloth bag. As he walks, the black cloth sack makes a hollow knocking sound as the wooden clubs inside bang together. The father carries two small steel cases the size of small suitcases in one hand, and two big white plastic buckets in the other that are reddish-grubby inside. “Same place as before?” he asks me.

“Follow me,” I say, and walk to the utility door of the basement. We go inside and pass the iron storage cages and are watched by the rocking horse with the big blue eyes and lady lashes. We go through the white door with the staff only sign on it, and the floor changes from cement to tiles. In the white tiled corridor I take them to the washroom where they will work. In here it always smells of the bleach used by the whispering cleaners. The cleaners sleep in the cupboard with all the bottles, mops, and cloths and are not allowed to use the staff room. When the white ape catches them in there smiling at the television, he roars.

I take the caterers into the big washroom that is tiled to the ceiling and divided in two by a metal rail and shower curtain. There is a sink and toilet on one side and the other half has a floor that slopes to the plug grate under the big round shower head. Against the wall in the shower section is a wooden bench, bolted to the wall. The father drops his cases and mask on to the bench. His head is round and pink as the flavoured yeast the residents eat from square ration tins.

The son coils his chains on the bench and removes his hood too. He has a weasel face with many pimples among the scruffy whiskers on his chin. His tiny black eyes flit about and his thin lips curl away from long gums and two sharp teeth like he is about to laugh.

“Luvverly,” the father says, looking around the washroom. I notice the father has no neck.

“Perfek,” the weasel son adds, grinning and sniffing.

“Your night boy asleep?” the father asks. His fat body sweats under his smock and apron. His sweat smells of beef powder. Small and yellow and sharp, his two snaggle teeth are the same as the son’s. When he squints, his tiny red eyes sink into his face.

I nod.

“Not for long,” the weasel says, and then shuffles about, giggling. They both smell of sweat and old blood.

I shuffle towards the door.

“Hang on. Hang on,” the father says. “We need you to open that friggin’ door when we bring the meat in.”

“Yeah,” Weasel agrees, while he threads the chains through the brass eyes in the top of the sacks.

The father opens the cases on the bench. Stainless steel gleams under the yellow lights. His tools are carefully fitted into little trays. In his world of dirty trucks, old sacks, rusty chains, and snaggle teeth, it surprises me to see his fat fingers become gentle on the steel of his tools.

With eyes full of glee, the weasel son watches his father remove the two biggest knives from a metal case. Weasel then unties the ribbon of the last sack with the hollow wooden sounds inside, and pulls out two thick clubs. He stands with a club in each hand, staring at me. He is pleased to see the horror on my little face. At the bottom of the clubs the wood is stained a dark colour and some bits have chipped off.

“Go fetch ’em in,” the father says, while he lays two cleavers with black handles on an oily cloth.

“Right,” the weasel son says.

We go back down the tiled corridor. I walk slowly because I am in no hurry to see the livestock. When Mrs. Van den Broeck, the Head Resident, announced the banquet, I decided I would show the livestock a friendly face before they were taken into the washroom; otherwise, the fat father and the weasel son would be the last people they would see in this world, before they were stuffed inside the sacks and chained up.

When we reach the courtyard, I remember what the fat father told me last time, about how the meat tastes better with bruises under the skin. That’s why they use the clubs. To tenderise the meat and get blood into the flesh. When he told me that, I wanted to escape from Gruut Huis and keep running into the poisonous mist until I fell down, until no one in the building could ever find me again. The residents don’t need to eat the fresh meats. Like the staff they can eat the soft yellow yeast from the tanks, but the residents are rich and can afford variety.

We go back into the courtyard. Above us some lights have come on in the flats. I can see the dark lumps of the residents’ heads watching from kitchen windows. And suddenly, from the east wing, the baboon child of Mr. Hussain screams. It rips the smoky air apart. Weasel Boy flinches. You never get used to the sound of the baboon child in the cage.

The weasel son rattles keys in his chainmail hand. “We done a wedding last week. St. Jan in de Meers.”

I can’t speak with all the churning in my tummy.

“We done eight livestock for the barbecue. Da girl’s farver was loaded. Had a tent built and everything. Ya know, a marquee. All in this garden, under a glass roof. Me and dad was up at five. They had fifty guests, like. We filled four ice-chests with fillets. Done the sausages the day before. For the kids, like.”

He finds the correct key and unlocks the back doors of the truck. Under his pig mask I know he is smiling. “We made a few shillings. There’s a few shillings to be made at weddings in this part of town.”

When Weasel opens the back doors, I feel the hot air puff out of the truck. With it comes the smell of pee and sweat to mix with the chemical stink of the swirly air. Two small shapes are huddled at the far end of the truck, near the engine where it is warmer.

I walk away from the open doors of the truck and look up at the vapours. They drift and show little pieces of grey sky. There is a smudgy yellow stain where the sun must be. But you can never tell with the cloud so low. I wish I was in heaven.

“C’mon ya shit-brains,” Weasel shouts from inside the truck. He’s climbed in to get the livestock out. They never want to come out.

I cringe as if he is about to pull a lion out of the back. Through the white sides of the truck comes a bumping of bare feet on metal and then the chinka, chinka, chinka of a chain.

Weasel Boy jumps out of the truck, holding a rope in both hands. “They as dumb as shit, but it’s like they know when this day is coming. Get outta there. Git! Git!”

Out of the back of the truck two pale yellowish figures stumble and then drop onto the misty slabs of the courtyard. They fall down and are yanked back to their feet by the weasel.

The livestock is skinny and completely shaven. Their elbows are tied together and their hands are tucked under their chins. They are young males with big eyes. They look like each other. Like angels with pretty faces and slender bodies. They start to cough in the acid-stinging air.

Shivering against each other, the smaller one starts to cry and hides behind the taller one, who is too frightened to cry, but pees instead, down the inside of his thighs. It steams in the cold air.

“Dirty bastards. They’ll piss anywhere. Trucks full of it. Yous’ll have to wash that corridor down after we’re gone.” Weasel Boy pulls the rope taut. Each male wears a thick iron collar that looks loose on his yellowish neck. A rope is attached to the short chains welded to the collars. In his metal hands Weasel Boy holds the slack rope.

As Weasel Boy pulls them across the courtyard, the livestock jogs and jostles together for warmth in the cold air. I run ahead to open the utility door, but can’t feel my legs properly, even when my knees bang together.

Inside the corridor I take off my mask and walk behind the livestock. Weasel Boy leads the way to the washroom. The livestock peer about at the storage cages. The small one stops crying, distracted by the paintings and furniture and boxes inside the cages. The taller one looks over his shoulder at me. He smiles. His eyes are full of water. I try to smile back at him, but my jaw is numb. So I just stare at him. His face is scared, but trusting and wanting a friend who smiles on this day when he is frightened.

I think what I think every time the caterers come to Gruut Huis, that there must be some kind of mistake. Livestock is supposed to be dumb. It has no feelings we’re told. But in these eyes I can see a frightened boy.

“No,” I say, before I even know I am speaking.

Weasel Boy turns around and stares at me. “You what?”

“This can’t be right.”

Weasel Boy laughs under his pig mask. “Don’t you believe it. They got human faces, but they is shit-brains. Pretty as pitchers, but dead in the head. They ain’t like us.”

There is so much I want to say, but all the words vanish off my tongue and my head is filled with wind. A big lump chokes my sparrow throat shut.

“Git! Git!” Weasel snarls at the livestock, who cringe at the sound of his voice. On the back of each livestock-boy I see the scars. Long pinkish scars with little holes around the slits, where the stitches once were, after things had been taken out of their thin bodies for the sick. “Best meat in town,” Weasel says to me, grinning. “They cook up lovely like. Thousand euro a kilo, they cost. More than fruit in them tins, like. Think of that. More than fruit in tins.”

Weasel Boy is pleased I am feeling dizzy and sick. And, like most people in this building, he likes to tell me things I don’t want to hear. “These two, we been feeding for months. Shut it!” He straps the smaller one, who has started to cry again, on the backside with the end of the rope. The little one suddenly stops crying when the rope makes a wet sound on his yellow buttock. The mark goes white. Then back to yellow again. The force of the blow makes him trip over the feet of the taller boy, who is still looking at me with watery eyes, wanting a smile from me. They have long toenails.

“Where…?”

Weasel Boy stops dragging the livestock and looks at me. “Aye?”

I clear my throat. “Where they from?”

“Nuns.”

“What?”

“Nuns. Them old nuns up in Brussels all died of the milk-leg. So all their shit-brains went to auction. These two were like strips of piss when me and me dad looked at them. No meat on them. All they got fed from them nuns was yeast and water. No good for the meat, see. So we been feeding them for months. Who’s they for, like?”

“Head Residents.” My voice is a whisper.

“Aye?”

“The Head Residents of the building. For the Annual Banquet.”

“They gonna love them.” Weasel Boy rips his mask off and points his septic muzzle at the livestock in a grimace to frighten them. They both try and hide behind each other, but get tangled.

The weasel’s bristle hair is wet with sweat. I wondered if the salt stings his pimples. They go down his neck and on to his back. I can smell the sickish vinegar of his boils.

“Are…Are…Are you sure it’s OK?” I know the answers to all of my stupid questions, asked in my stupid voice, but I have to keep speaking to hold my panic back. The livestock starts to giggle.

“Like I said, don’t be fooled. They’s useless. Was nothing but pets to them nuns. Only me and me dad make them worth anything. They is worth more than the organs in you and me put together.” He tugs the rope hard so the livestock make chokey noises and their naked bodies slap against his rubber apron. Their eyes are watering. The little one looks up into the Weasel Boy’s rat eyes and tries to hug him.

But the livestock go quiet when the washroom door is opened. Weasel Boy shoves them inside. Through the gap in the door, I can see his fat dad holding a sack open. “Get in here,” he growls at the big one. Both livestocks start to cry.

“I have to get back to my desk,” I say, even though I can’t feel my jaw.

“Fair enough,” Weasel says, with a smirk. “We need you to open the doors when we finish the first one. Me mam is coming at three. She’s the cook. Me dad’ll bring her later. We’ll do the second one in the morning.”

He closes the door. Behind me the livestock is crying in the washroom. The Fat Dad is shouting and the Weasel Son is laughing. I can hear it all through the white tiled walls. I put my fingers inside my ears as I run away.

Follow me through the dark house. Watch me kill the old lady. It won’t take long.

My little brass clock says it’s three in the morning, so I’ll go and put a pillow over Mrs. Van den Broeck’s bird mouth until she stops breathing. It’ll be all right as long as I pretend it’s just an ordinary thing that I’m doing. I know because I’ve done this before.

Above my bunk, Vinegar Irish is asleep and snoring in his bed. He won’t see me leave the dormitory room. After drinking so much this evening—the cleaning liquid with the wet paint smell that I stole from the stores for him—he climbed into bed on his hands and knees with eyes looking at nothing in particular. Most mornings it takes me over twenty minutes to wake him for our work upstairs behind the reception desks. He drinks all day, can remember nothing, and needs his sleep. His face is purple with veins and his lumpy nose smells of bad yeast.

I go out of the dormitory with the bunk beds and I follow the cement path through the big storeroom. There are no lights on in the store because we are forbidden to come here at night, but I know my way around in the dark. Sometimes at night I go into the cages with a torch and the master keys to poke around the boxes, trunks, and cases full of things that used to matter in the world. But nothing you can eat or sell for food so it has no value now. Sometimes, as I walk through the store, I feel I’m being watched from inside the cages.

Slowly, I unlock the air-tight door that opens into the courtyard. Already, since I have worked here, five residents have jumped from the sixth floor and smashed themselves on the tarmac below. They had the lunger disease and were choking on red brine. At night you could hear their voices in the cold courtyard, drifting out of windows and spanking off all the brick walls as they drowned in bed. Whuff, whuff, whuff they went.

I go out from the store and step into the mist. The door shuts behind me with a wheeze. Cold out here and the rain sizzles through the fog to sting the thin skin over my skull. Then the air gets inside my nose and mouth too and it feels like I am sucking a battery. No one is permitted to go outdoors without a mask because of the poison in the air, but the porters’ masks are only sacks with plastic cups sewn over the mouth-part. My face stings just as much with a mask on and I sweat too much inside the linen, so when no one is watching I go out without a mask over my big white head. I’m not too worried about dying. At the boys’ home I came from, the nurses told me, “People in your condition never see their teens.” I’m eighteen so I should be dead soon. Inside my see-through chest one of the little grey pumps or blackish lumps will just stop working. Maybe I’ll go greyish first like most of the residents dying upstairs inside the flats.

Crouching down, my shoulder in the nightgown slides against the red brick walls. A special coating to stop the air dissolving the whole place has made the bricks smooth. Taking shallow stinging breaths, I look up. Most of the apartments are dark, but a few yellowy kitchens shine like little boxes, high up in the vapours that fill the world outside our airlocks and sealed doors.

I go up the giant black metal fire escape to the airlock that will get me into the west wing reception. If there was a fire here, and the thought of it makes me grin, where could the residents be evacuated to? They would stand in the courtyard and watch the building blaze around them until the air in their masks ran out. This is the last place they can retreat to in the city. There’s nowhere left to hide from the mist in the world. At night, when I stand on the roof by the big satellite dishes, I see fewer lights out there in the city. Like the people, the lights are all being turned off one by one.

Outside the little back door of the west wing, I wait for the dizzies in my head to stop. I’m so scared now my dolly hands and puppet legs have gone all shaky. Closing my eyes, I tell myself this is going to be easy, it’s just an ordinary thing that I’m about to do.

I think of the two little boys who came here inside the white truck. I will always see their frightened faces as they are pulled by the caterer’s ropes. Mrs. Van den Broeck wanted them. She brought them here. So now I am going to her.

Feeling stronger after the attack of the dizzies passes, I tap the code into the steel number pad on the wall beside the little back door: 1, 2, 3, 4. An easy sequence to remember so Vinegar Irish can always get inside. The door unlocks with a click and hiss. I push it open.

Yellow corridor light, the smell of cleaned carpets, and polished wood comes out the door to die in the mist. Ducking my head, I climb through quickly. If any of the doors of the building are open for longer than five seconds a buzzer will go off behind the reception desk and wake the night porter.

Blinking my black button eyes I get rid of the outside mist in my tears. The corridor becomes clear. It’s empty. Only thing I can hear is the sound of the ceiling lights as they buzz inside their glass shades. My thin feet go warm on the red carpet. This corridor will take me down to reception.

Creeping and sneaking, I go grinning down the passage and stop at the end where it opens into the reception. Listening hard with my eyes closed I try to hear the squeak of the porter’s chair. But there is only silence down there behind the reception desk. Good.

Going down to my hands and knees I peek the top half of my head around the corner. I smile. Leaning back in his chair with his red face pointed at the ceiling, the white ape sleeps tonight. Big purple tongue and one brown tooth, hot with shit-breath, swallowing the clean air. He is supposed to be watching the monitor screens on his desk. But he has even taken his glasses and shoes off. I can see his black socks full of white hair and yellow claws on top of the desk.

I go into reception on my dolly hands and bony knees and I crawl to the staircase that will take me up to her. Even if the white ape’s eyes open now, he won’t see me because of the desk’s high front. He would have to stand up and put his glasses on to catch sight of my thin bones in the nightgown and my swollen skull going up the stairs like a spider.

I go up the stairs to the second floor and stand outside the door marked number five. Her smell is strong up here, perfume and medicine. When I think of Mrs. Van den Broeck’s grey bird head on a fat silk pillow, sleeping somewhere on the other side of this wooden door, my slit-mouth trembles.

All day long I run up and down these stairs on errands for the residents, they who cannot be argued with at any time. But now I am up here in a flappy nightshirt with a stolen key because I mean to drown one of them in pillow softness. A big part of me wants to run back down the stairs, go through the building and across the courtyard to my little warm bunk in the dormitory where Vinegar Irish snores and wheezes above me.

Resting on my ankles, I put my head between my knees and screw my eyes shut. All of this—the building of old brick, the shiny wooden doors, the marble skirting boards, the wall mirrors and brass lights, the rich people and Mrs. Van den Broeck with her white gloves and pecking face—are so much bigger than me. I am a grain of seed that cannot escape her yellow teeth. In my left doll hand I squeeze the key until it hurts.

Today, two pale boys with pee on their hairless legs stepped about on cold toes in the back of the caterer’s truck. They held each other with small hands, crying and smiling, and making throaty sounds to each other. They were marched by the caterers to the washroom with the white tiles and the big plug in the middle. And then the smaller one had to watch his brother being put inside a sack....

Inside my slit-mouth my squarish milk teeth grind together. Inside my fists my long nails make red half-moons on my palms. She brought them here. Mrs. Van den Broeck called for the white truck that had the bumping sounds of boys inside. My stomach makes squally sounds as the rage makes me shake and go the pink colour of the blind things that no chemicals can kill, who flit deep in the hot oceans, so far down they cannot be caught and eaten.

With a snarl, I stand up. Into the brass lock of her front door goes the key. The thunk of the lock opening feels good within the china bones of my dollish hand. My fingers look so small against the brown wood. I push the heavy door. A sigh of air escapes. The whisper of her apartment’s air runs over my face: medicine, dusty silk, old lady sour smell.

Inside it is dark. The door closes behind me with a tired sound.

Waiting for my eyes to get used to the place, the outlines of vases, dry flowers, picture frames, a hat stand and mirror appear out of the gloom. Then I notice a faint bluish light spilling from the kitchen. It comes from the electric panel with the warning lights about leaks and gases and fires; all the flats have them. In the kitchen is where I usually take yeast tins and put them on the blue table for the maid Gemima to unpack. Gemima is the tiny woman who wears rubber sandals and who never speaks. But after tonight, Gemima will also be free of Mrs. Van den Broeck, and there will be no more journeys up here for me with the wet meats inside the plastic bags. No more feeling like my body is made of glass that will shatter when she shouts. No more poking from her bird claws. No more squinting from her tiny pink eyes when she teeters out of the elevator in the afternoon and sees my big head behind the reception desk.

I look down the hallway and see her bedroom door at the end. I pass the living room where she sits in the long silk gown and scolds us porters down the house phone. Then I tippy-toe past the bathroom where Gemima scrubs Mrs. Van den Broeck’s spiny back and rinses her shrunken chest.

I stand outside the two bedrooms. Gemima sleeps in the left one. Now she will be resting for a few hours until her mistress’s sharp voice begins another day for her. But part of Gemima never sleeps. The part of Gemima that must listen for the sound of Mrs. Van den Broeck’s bird feet on the marble tiles and the scratch of her voice, calling out for attention from among the crystals and china cups and photos of smiling men with big teeth and thick hair in her room. This part of Gemima I must be careful of.

Mrs. Van den Broeck sleeps behind the right door in a big bed. I go in on legs I cannot feel. In here there is no light, the curtains are thick and fall to the floor. There is complete darkness…and a voice. It crackles in my ears. “Who’s there?”

I stop moving and feel like I am underwater and trying to gulp a breath that will never come. Taking a step back, I want to run from here. Then I am about to say my own name, like I do on the house phone when the residents call down from upstairs. Hello, Bobby speaking. How may I help? I stop myself before my lips form the shape of the first word.

“Is that you, Gemima?”

Has my heart stopped beating inside its cage of thin bone and see-through skin?

“What’s the time? Where are my glasses?”

I listen out for Gemima and imagine her rising without thought or choice from her cot next door. The other room stays silent, but it won’t for long if Mrs. Van den Broeck keeps talking. Somewhere in front of me I hear a rustling. Out there in the dark I know a birdie claw is reaching for the switch of a table lamp. If the light comes on there might be a scream.

I cannot move.

“Who is there?” she says, her voice deeper. I can imagine the squinty eyes and pointy mouth with no lips. Again, I hear her long claws rake across the wooden surface of the side table by the bed. The light cannot come on or I am finished. I race to the sound of her voice.

Something hard and cold hits my shin bones and blue streaks of pain enter my head. It is the end of her metal bed-frame that I have run into, so I am not in the part of the room I thought I was.

Greenish light explodes through the glass shade of the table lamp and makes me flinch. Propped up among fat pillows with shiny cases is Mrs. Van den Broeck. I can see her pointy shoulders and satin nightgown where the bedclothes have slipped down. Collarbones stick through skin. She must sleep with her head raised and ready to snap at Gemima when she comes in with the breakfast.

Small red eyes watch me. Her face is surprised, but not afraid. For a while she cannot speak and I stand dizzy before her with pinpricks of sweat growing out of my whole head.

“What are you doing in my room?” There is no sleepiness in her voice, she has been awake for a long time. Not even her hair is mussed up or flat at the back. Her voice gets sharper. It fills the room. “I knew it was you. I always knew you were not to be trusted. You’ve been taking things. Jewellery. I suspected you from the start.”

“No. It wasn’t me.” I feel like I’m five again, before the desk of the director at the boys’ home.

“I’ll have you executed in the morning. You disgust me.” Her face has begun to shake and she pulls her bedsheets up to her chin, as if to stop me looking at her bird body in the shiny nighty. “People will thank me for having you put down. You should have been smothered in the cradle. Why do they let things like you live?” All this I have heard before when she is in a spiteful mood. But the thing that makes me so angry is her suspicion that I want to look at her skeleton body in the silk gown.

At any moment I expect Gemima to come in and start wailing. Then the white ape will be up here too and I will have a few hours to live. I stare at the bird-face with the plume of grey hair. Never have I hated anything so much. A little gargle comes out of my throat and I am at her bedside before she can say another word.

She looks up at me with surprise in her eyes. Neither of us can believe we are facing each other like this in her bedroom. This is not how I imagined it would be: the light on, me in my nightgown, and Mrs. Van den Broeck’s dry-stick body sitting upright and supported by pillows.

She opens her mouth to speak, but no spiky words come out to hurt my ears. It is my time to speak. “You,” I say. “The boys. The boys in the truck. You brought them here.”

“What are you talking about? Have you lost your mind?”

I take one of the pillows from behind her back. Mrs. Van den Broeck never liked to see my china-doll hands poking from the sleeves of my uniform, so it is only right they are the last things she sees before I put the pillow over her face.

“Oh,” she says in a little girl voice. Her frown is still asking me a question when I put her in the dark and take away the thin streams of air that must whistle through her beak holes. I grin the wild grin I cannot control that makes my whole face shake. This bully-bird can’t peck me now.

Her pigeon skull fidgets under the pressing pillow. Twiggish legs with brown spots on the skin kick out inside the sheets, but only make whispers like mice behind the skirting boards. Claws open, claws close, claws open, claws stop moving.

I put my big onion skull against the pillow to add weight to my late-night pressings. Now our faces are closer together than they have ever been before, but we can’t see each other. A few feathers and some silk are the only things between us. The pillow smells of perfume and old lady. Squirts of excitement start in my belly. Triumph makes me want to take a shit.

I whisper words through the veil between us. I send her on her way with mutterings. “The little boys from the truck were crying when they were taken into the tiled room”—flicker of talon on the mattress—“They were scared, but didn’t know why they were going to be hurt. They didn’t understand”—stretching of a single bony leg under the sheets—“What do they look like on your plate?”—final kick of twisted foot, and a yellow nail snags on silk—“There was laughter in the boardroom during dinner. I heard you. I was outside and I heard you all”—all the thin bones relax and go soft under me—“Then you made me bring the leftovers up here in white bags. They banged against my legs on the stairs. They felt heavy. The bags were wet inside.”

Now she’s still. Nothing under me but bird bones, fossils wrapped in silk, and some hair, but not much else.

I stay on top of her for a while. Now it’s done I feel warm inside. Milky sweat cools on the skin under my nightgown. I take the pillow off Mrs. Van den Broeck’s face and step back from the bed. I pad out the part that was over her beak. Leaning across her I put the pillow back behind her warm body.

Underneath my body one of her chicken-bone arms suddenly moves, quicker than I thought something old and skinny could move. Yellow claws curl around my elbow. I look down. An eggshell brow wrinkles. Pink eyes open and make me gasp. I try to pull away.

Bird snarl.

Pinched mouth opens wide. Two rows of tiny yellow teeth sink into my wrist.

Now I’m drowning. Pain and panic fills my balloon skull like hot water. I pull and tug and yanky-shake at her biting beak that wants to saw off my dolly hand. Grunting, she holds on. How can an old thing like Mrs. Van den Broeck, made from such tiny bones and paper skin, make so deep a noise?

Digging my heels into the rug, I push backwards with all my strength, but her body comes forward in a tangle of sheets, pulled across the mattress by her mouth. Snarly and spitting, she shakes her head from side to side and I think my wrist is broken. I should have guessed 170 years of her evil life could not be stopped by a soft pillow in the night.

Mad from the pain, I swat my free hand around in the air and it hits something solid. Now there are stabbing pains in the knuckles of that hand too from where it struck the heavy lamp. Strength leaks out of my feet and into the rug. Black dots float in front of my eyes. I might faint. It feels like her serrated beak has gone through a nerve.

I fall backwards and pull her whole body off the bed. Her stick-body hits the floor but makes no sound. I stand up and try to shake her off like I’m trying to pull off a tight shirt that has gone inside-out over my face. Tears blur my eyes.

I reach for the lamp on the bedside table. My little hand circles the hot smooth neck below the bulb. Pulling it off the table, I watch the thick green marble-base drop to the biting head on the rug. There is a thock sound as the sharp stone corner strikes the side of her head by the small ear. She stops biting.

I twist my wrist free of the loose beak and step away. I look down and can’t believe so much liquid could spill from the broken head of a very old bird. The liquid is black. It’s been going through her thin pipes and tubes for 170 years, and now it is soaking into a rug.

Working fast I wrap the white cord of the lamp around her claw and make it go tight. Maybe they will think she fell from her pillows and pulled the lamp down on top of her bird head. With the tail of my nightshirt I then wipe at all the things my dollish fingers have touched around the bed.

I flit from her room like a ghost. Go down the long hall and close the front door behind me. In the light of the landing I inspect the circle of bruises and cuts her beak has made on my stiff wrist. Not as bad as it felt.

I find it hard to believe Gemima is not screaming and that doors are not opening and that phones are not ringing and that residents are not shuffling down the stairs in dressing gowns. But there is only silence in the west wing.

Then the shaking starts.

Down the stairs I go on my hands and knees like a spider with four legs torn off. Back to my bunk.

Curled up in the warm place I have made in the middle of my bed, with the thin sheet and itchy grey blanket pulled over my head, I try and stop the shakes and try and wipe away all the pictures that swirl around my pumpkin skull. There is so much room inside the big space, so I guess it can hold more memories than a smaller head. Over and over I see the chewing bird that was Mrs. Van den Broeck, her beak fastened on my wrist, and then I see the heavy lamp land with a thock…thock…thock.... It’s all I can hear: the sharp marble corner breaking the wafer of her veiny temple.

What have I done in this giant house? What will become of me? They will know that my dolly hands got busy with a pillow and bedside lamp to crush that flightless vulture in its own nest. I wonder if turning back the hands on my little brass clock will take me back to the time before I went sneaking and creeping into her room.

An impulse makes my face scrunch up to cry and my body shivers under the blankets. Then I stand up beside the bunk and peer into the top bed where Vinegar Irish snores. I wish I was him. With no killing pictures inside his head, only thoughts of clear liquid to sup from plastic containers, flowing through his twitchy sleep.

The cold in the porters’ dormitory makes my shaking worse. My wrist throbs. I want to get back into my bed and curl into a ball. Like the baby in the tummy before I was cut out and made my momma die.

I leave the dormitory and look down to the washroom door.

No one is shouting, there are no alarms or lights being turned on. All is quiet in the building. No one knows Mrs. Van den Broeck is dead. No one knows it was me, yet.

Inside I feel better. No one saw me. No one heard me. Gemima was asleep the whole time, dreaming of the hot green place across the oceans where she was born. I just have to stay calm. Maybe no one will suspect me, the big-headed boy with the doll hands. What can he do with those puppet legs and pencil arms? That big bulb head with the baby face stuck on the front is not capable of thinking of such things, maybe that’s what they will think. That’s what they thought at the orphanage too. That’s how I got away with it before. They never even thought of me at the same time as they thought about the nasty smacking carers all found dead in their beds. I did three of them carers with these small china hands.

I grin with joy. My little grey heart slows down its pumping. All the pebbles of sweat dry across my skin. Warmth spreads through every teeny toe and twig finger, up through my see-through body to my roundish head, until I am glowing with the happiness of escaping and of tricking them. All of them who don’t know about the power in my tiny hands.

And in my head now, I see the little boy who came in the white truck. The one they ate yesterday. He is dancing in heaven. Up there, the sky is totally blue. He likes the long grass that is soft between his toes and he likes the way the yellow sun warms his jumping running body. It was for him and his brother that I dropped the heavy lamp. Thock. What happened to him must always be remembered. I see it again now. I see it all behind my squeezed-shut, black-button eyes.

But what of the other one?

And then I go down to the washroom and I unlock the door. Behind the wood of the door before it is even open, I hear the skitter of dry feet retreat into a corner. A whimper.

No, they shall not have you too.

I open the door and walk past the dark wet bench beside the white wall. And I go to the huddled yellowish boy in the corner. I smile. He takes my small outstretched hand. Blinks wet eyes.

I think of the Cathedral of Our Lady and of the mist. We’ll need a blanket.

“Your brother’s waiting for us,” I say, and he stands up.