For Rye Gavin Gardiner (best book club books for discussion TXT) 📖

she’d watched her countless literary creations do over the years. She felt as she had that night when her body ceased its subliminal resistance and, for the first time, received a man.

His tightening arms said everything his lips didn’t. She burrowed into the thick fabric of his turtleneck. She felt the voiceless whispering of his embrace assure her it was okay, that she was safe. She looked into those horn-rimmed frames, the evening chill tickling her tear-stained cheeks.

‘Quentin, I don’t want to be alone anymore.’

13

 

The girl is now sixteen years old, the boy six.

Her birthday is today, as is his.

She sits on her bed. The room is bare, save for a small dresser and wardrobe. Her identity lies not in this room, but another across the fields, high above a cemetery. A secret room. She will go there now.

Moments ago, she realised the papers, her seven chapters, were not where she thought she’d left them the previous night. Her eyes widen in panic. She must have set them down in that damned larder when returning the soup flask.

Downstairs: a cheer for every gift her brother tears open. No cheers from the kitchen, meaning the coast is clear to the larder. She checks her room one last time for the papers. All she finds is that old diary. Its opening pages are sparse, dotted with the occasional account of daily life. Reliving each day became painful, so the entries grew fewer. Many pages are left blank until suddenly, halfway through, the pages fill. She discovers storytelling.

Whooping from downstairs. A woman shrieks. Screams of laughter from another.

The girl is finished with the diary. She now writes on the crisp, yellow writing paper Mr Harper gives her. Scrawled upon a pile of these sheets, the missing sheets, are the first seven chapters to her best story yet. Adelaide Addington is finally speaking off the page. Those pages. For weeks she’s toiled over her creation, the pages a mess of corrections and amendments, but within this code only she could decipher lies the first thing of which the girl has ever felt proud. If the papers have been found, and she’s wrong in her belief that no one could decipher them, then things will get bad. Father will get bad.

The diary’s served its purpose – for now. She stuffs it into the back of the dresser drawer. It will lie here for decades, until it is reclaimed to serve an unthinkable purpose.

She grabs her rucksack and slips out of the bedroom door, then slinks downstairs. The whooping in the dining room – the ‘special occasion room’ – has been replaced by chattering. The front door is open, but she won’t use it. Mother and Mr O’Connell are locked in deep conversation on the porch, a glass of scotch swirling in his hand. She’d never make it past them. She’ll use the back door.

The girl sneaks through the impeccably clean living room as the grandfather clock continues its unrelenting ticking. The latest of Father’s precious hounds, the latest Samson, glares at her as if she’s committing some terrible sin, the knowledge of which it cannot share. She glances nervously at the flood painting.

‘Whale is it?’ Noah says, red curls hanging over blank eyes. He stands in the doorway, expressionless. ‘Whale’s my plesent, Lenata?’

She backs through the kitchen door, fists clenched. Get the papers and get out, she tells herself.

The larder door towers over her. She tugs on its cast iron pull handle, the cold from inside rushing over her as the heavy door swings opens. She finds herself unable to enter. It’s the same every time, her legs refusing to carry her into her former prison cell. She thinks of those two days six years ago in the pitch-black without food or water, soiling herself, no concept of time. But that was then, this is now.

Choo-choo.

She takes a deep breath and steps over the threshold, walking hurriedly to the far end where the flask sits. She looks back. In the entrance stands Noah.

The short, flimsy specimen stares at her. His dirty red hair falls around his face; dirty, like the mud he spends his days digging up. In his hands are that stupid bucket and spade. Unknown to the girl, this spade will come to serve another purpose in weeks to come.

An unthinkable purpose.

The siblings stare at one another for a moment, frozen in silence. The boy’s mouth twitches. She tries to speak but cannot. Her eyes beg him to reconsider what she knows is inevitable. Not again. Please, please, please not again not again not—

The door slams.

Like father like son.

The larder light is left on, unlike last time, but this only means she’s able to watch the shelf-lined walls close in around her closing in closing in like the back of those bin lorries she sometimes sees gobbling up all the rubbish except she’s the rubbish and she can’t believe this is happening again and I need to get out closing in I can’t take this not again closing in closing in please someone anyone I can’t—

Rage and terror and panic bubble up inside her like a shaken Cola bottle, before melting into the searing realisation that her precious papers are not in the pantry. They must be elsewhere in the house, sitting in wait of prying eyes. Father’s eyes.

She spots four drill holes in the floor, drilled six years ago exactly wide enough for a chair.

She screams.

Time folds in on itself and dissolves to nothing as her hellborn wails fill the larder and, for however long they go on for, become her universe. The chattering of the guests would have masked her cries had the thick door not soundproofed her cell. Her screaming finally ceases, if only from exhaustion. Tears soak her cheeks. She stumbles back from the locked entrance, edging fearfully around the