“Can you talk a little bit about what they involved?”
Siobhan takes a long sip of her coffee. It’s cold, strong, bitter. “The women had to prove that they had what it takes to survive on the outside. They had to…” She pauses, clears her throat, then continues more quietly. “They had to transform into their hex. And then they had to bring back a sacrifice.”
“And when you say transform, you mean into…” Zara pauses, and Siobhan doesn’t miss the way she shudders. She knows she’ll be thinking of the creature she saw Lakshmi become on film, a creature that shouldn’t exist. “They transform into birds?” The word sounds so surreal, so absurd, that Siobhan laughs. Zara flinches, and Siobhan realises how she must look on camera: delirious, unhinged. “Sorry,” Zara says, “intohexes?”
Siobhan nods.
Zara’s face is blank, giving nothing away. She maintains eye contact from behind the camera. Siobhan is grateful for her practised calmness. It creates a net, a net she can pour it all into. “And by sacrifice,” Zara continues, “what do you mean?”
Siobhan feels her lungs expand and contract – once, twice, thrice. Funny how some breaths take so much more effort than others, how some you need to convince your body to take, if only to remind yourself,I am alive I am alive I am alive.
“A human sacrifice,” she says eventually. “The hexes hunt people who have done harm, done horrible things. Things you can’t forgive, that’s what Haina said. How she justified it, I suppose.These people have done things that need to be punished. But they also had to find someone who wouldn’t be missed, see. Rapists. Murderers, loners. They always seemed to know the right ones to take. I don’t know how.” The words hang in the air. Zara’s face blanches. “They rip them apart. Destroy them. Once they’ve made a sacrifice, they’ve completed their ceremony.Thenthey’re allowed to leave.”
Zara looks as though she’s going to be sick. She lurchesforward to pause the recording and spends a long few minutes with her head between her thighs, breathing deeply. Siobhan stays where she is, staring at the table. There is a faint buzzing between her ears. She has carried it all for so long, and almost feels too light without it, as if she might simply drift away. She watches as Zara rights herself, wipes the sweat from her forehead and clicks the camera on again.
“I want to talk to you a little bit about Elly Carmichael,” she says, voice steady once more. It’s impressive, really, how she’s able to control herself. “Do you feel ready to talk about her?”
Siobhan’s throat is already dry and constricted. But she’d known this moment was coming, so she forces herself to say, “Okay.”
“Were you at the house when she gave birth to Thomas?”
Siobhan nods.
“Can you tell us a little bit about that?”
Siobhan can remember it all so clearly, the way they’d all lingered out on the grass after Grace’s ceremony. Siobhan had run back to the room to get the camera. With Grace gone, there was no one to stop her recording. The camera panned around the euphoric faces of the guests as they sang together and hollered at the top of their voices, sending swinging cries far out into the night. Siobhan had felt numb to everything she’d witnessed: the writhing woman on the ground, already bleeding out, the dark-eyed guests crowding around her, the way they’d spelled out that word in the grass, the word that seemed to pull everything into its orbit.Hex. She’d expected to be disgusted,but instead, she’d felt the release of something in her belly – something uncurling, something responding. She would ask Haina about that, the next time they were alone.
When the camera found Theo, he was staring straight back at her, pale and grim-faced. There was vomit on the side of his mouth. He started to shake his head, to say her name, but another sound interrupted him: a high keening, animal and strange. She’d spun the camera to the source and found Elly on all fours in the grass, one hand clutching at her stomach. Somebody shouted,The baby, and Haina was the first to move. She picked Elly up as if she weighed nothing at all and carried her into the house. Strong Haina. Capable Haina. Surely nothing bad could happen to Elly, not while Haina was there holding her.
On a night she can’t quite pinpoint in the loose landscape of the last week, Siobhan had found the footage of the birth. She watched it and then replayed it again, starting with the shaky moment she’d followed Haina and Elly into the parlour, where someone had already laid out clean towels and sheets. Siobhan propped the camera up on the table before rushing to help. Later, she would tell Theo that she’d forgotten the camera was rolling, but that was a lie. Even while she held a wet flannel to Elly’s forehead, all she could think, with a shocking amount of clarity, was,This is going to make for great footage. She left it running all night and only switched it off when the baby arrived, pink and mewling, just before noon. All around its fleshy body had been cracked pieces of shell.
“I haven’t seen many newborn babies, but I knew Thomas was beautiful,” she tells Zara now.
“How did Haina react? When he was born?”
Siobhan remembers Haina’s face – jubilant, sweaty. “She looked at him like he belonged to her,” she says.Isn’t it wonderful, Haina had said to Siobhan later that day,isn’t it wonderful to have some fresh blood in the house?“Like he belonged to all of us.”
***
Later, in the bath at Owen’s house, Siobhan listens to the sounds of him cooking for her in the kitchen: the soft clatter of utensils, the turning on of the extractor fan, the slight resistance of the seal as the fridge is opened and closed again. Like everything in Owen’s flat, the bathroom is clean and simple, all white metro tiles on the walls, a thick glass panel bisecting the room to create a shower, a roll-top bath with brass feet. Siobhan’s dark hair floats all around her, slightly reddish and mermaid-like. She combs her fingers through it, looking down at her body: her small chest and nipples the colour of conkers, her lean stomach, the way her pelvic bone arches up against the skin like the walls of a cathedral. The colour of her scar has changed again: the skin around it is sallow now. Greenish. She knows it’s infected, that the infection will be causing the queasiness and her headaches and the clamminess at the back of her neck. What she needs is a doctor’s appointment and a prescription and a little foil packet of oblong pills to be taken with food three times a day. But it all just feels like too big of an ask: the calling up and making an appointment, the sitting in a waiting room looking at the floor, the pointed questions in a room that smells of antiseptic.And how did you say you got this?they’ll ask, and she’ll say,I can’t tell you, I don’t know anymore. It’s her body, she’ll let it rot if it wants to.
In the other room, she can now hear Owen’s voice. He’s on the phone. He speaks softly, as though he doesn’t want her to hear. Whoever is on the other end of the line, it’s someone he speaks softly to. As quietly as she can, Siobhan rises from the bathtub and creeps naked across the bathroom to put her ear to the door. A small puddle of water forms at her feet. She struggles to decipher the sentences, but the odd thing stands out.
Meeting. Tomorrow. I’ve been waiting.
When he hangs up, Siobhan wraps herself in a towel and walks out into the kitchen without drying herself. He jumps when he sees her there, dripping onto the tiles, pale and pruned from the bath.
“Feeling better?” he asks.
Siobhan tries to remember turning up at his door but can’t. She can’t remember if she’s been drinking today or if it’s the persistent wooziness that’s making her forgetful; the half-awake clamour behind her eyes making everything else seem fuzzy and faraway.
“Yes,” she says, and he seems pleased with that, though he’s still frowning. Siobhan has the vague sense that she’s in trouble, that she’s said or done something she shouldn’t have. Something he feels she should be ashamed of.
“Here.” He piles a plate with something gloopy and beige. It smells like spices. “It’s Tarka Dhal,” he says, and Siobhan can’t summon the energy to ask what that means. She takes it to the island and picks at it, scooping up the same few lentils with a fork then putting them down again.
“Was that Sylvie on the phone?”
Owen pauses on his way over to her, holding his own steaming bowl. He’s obviously trying to keep all his features neutral, but the slight quirk of his eyebrow shows her all she needs to see.
