My heart felt like it was crumpling in my chest.
I pressed my hand on the door, and then stopped myself. There was blood all over me. I had become so obsessed with arming myself, even in sleep, that I had ended up stabbing myself. And now my bed was covered in blood and here was my mother thinking she had seen the worst of it already. She couldn’t see me like this. It would only make it a hundred times worse.
I reeled backwards.
I crept back upstairs, where I washed my hand in the bathroom sink and wrapped it in strips of cotton wool. In the mirror, a grey-eyed wisp stared back at me. Where had the blue gone? In the half-light, I couldn’t help thinking of Elena Genovese-Falcone’s words to me. I supposed I did look a little bit soulless. I felt a little bit soulless too.
I found a spare sheet in the ironing cupboard and spread it over my bed, covering the bloodstain on the mattress. I buried myself beneath the duvet and lay on my back, looking at the ceiling as my hand pulsed. When the tiredness came, I stuffed the duvet in my mouth and prayed that when I woke up screaming my mother wouldn’t hear it.
CHAPTER FIVE
THE DOLPHIN PHILOSOPHY
‘Hey, Paranoid Patty, can I come in?’
I opened the front door and Millie bounded through it, shaking her head at me as she slid her oversized sunglasses off her face and on to her hair. ‘You’re like something out of a bad horror movie, peering through your sitting-room curtains like that. It’s the middle of the afternoon!’
‘There was a car …’ I started, and then instantly gave up. ‘Never mind. Come in.’
She padded after me into the sitting room, where I was watching old re-runs of America’s Next Top Model. Tyra Banks was on-screen berating a model for being disrespectful and not ‘caring enough’ about the opportunity. She was so angry it looked like her eyes were going to pop out of her head, but the model was just staring through her, totally checked out. I could kind of relate to that feeling.
‘God.’ Millie crinkled her nose at the screen and then turned in a slow swivel back to me. ‘What’s this all about?’
‘Tyra was rooting for her,’ I said, pointing at the screen. ‘And now she’s pissed ’cause Tiffany basically didn’t give a crap, so it’s become this whole drama.’
Millie was moving her index finger in a big circle, gesturing at the TV in its entirety. ‘Soph, I meant gen-er-ally,’ she said, elongating the word, so that she sounded extra British. ‘You know I meant generally.’
‘Did you know there’s such a thing as a “smize”, Mil? It’s like smiling … but you do it with your eyes.’
‘Uh-huh … Did you know there’s such a thing as a sun? It’s like fire, only it’s a big round ball in the sky.’
‘There’s also this thing called the “booty tooch”. It’s something.’
Millie halted me before I could demonstrate, raising her hands in the air and whipping her hair across her face in a violent head-turn. ‘Please. You know how uncomfortable second-hand embarrassment makes me. Where’s your mum? Do we need to stage some kind of intervention here?’
‘She’s in the garden … it’s her new hobby.’ Obsession might have sounded a little harsh, if true. My mother was constantly planting new flowers. Sometimes she stayed in the garden so long she forgot to eat dinner. She forgot to work, too – maybe she didn’t want to – and now our garden bloomed with ten shades of strange flowers and unruly shrubs, while her commissioned projects lay in unfinished piles of fabric around the house. I think she hated being indoors the same way I suddenly hated being outside. I think she hated idle moments of stitching or sketching when her brain would bring her back to that night in the warehouse, to the sound of bullets and the smell of blood. She had the garden, I had the switchblade, and I had no right to judge her obsession.
‘At least one of you is getting some vitamin D.’ Millie flung open the curtains and I recoiled like a vampire, flinching at the sun’s invading rays. ‘You’ll go see-through if you get any paler.’
‘I’m fine.’ I was surprised at how genuine I sounded. I couldn’t remember the last time I had slept properly. The slash from Luca’s blade was still fresh and pulsing, and every couple of hours, my heart would do this weird thing and seize up, and then my breathing would quicken and I’d get the sudden sense I was about to die.
‘Very believable,’ said Millie. ‘You are not fine. You are in deep denial. And pretending this fear doesn’t exist is not beating it, it’s accommodating it. And it has to stop, OK?’ She had her hands on her hips. She was definitely not smizing. ‘Bad things happen. And then you get over them. That’s how it goes. I know this whole situation has been … unfortunate.’