Very, she replies.
She goes to the bathroom and clicks on the overhead light, which is pale and sickly. It makes her skin look like it’s glowing. She opens her phone’s camera and captures her topless torso in the bathroom mirror. Her face, which is sallow and drawn, and her leaking scar, she leaves out. She sends the photo to Owen.
Jesus Christ, he replies. Then, after another minute,You’re so incredible.
Siobhan goes into the kitchen and makes herself a rum and coke, and then another, and then just a rum. The radio plays thumping bass into the flat. She sways and bounces, knocking over furniture, until someone in the flat below bangs on the ceiling. She jumps up and down on the spot where she hears their banging, trying not to cry.
When she finally falls asleep, she dreams of the tiny mouths of birds. She dreams of them open and wanting. She dreams of Thomas reaching out to her with his fat fists.
Come back to Hex House. Come back.
***
The next day at the Showroom, when Sylvie reaches into her handbag to pull out a lipstick, Siobhan catches sight of something silky in the bag. A slip with a lace trim. It makes her feel like she’s drowning in something rich anddelicious, though she is so feverish today she thinks she might actually be sick. Her scar feels as though it’s been seared into her skin with a hot iron.
“What are you doing tonight?” Siobhan asks, towards the end of Sylvie’s shift. She knows exactly what Sylvie is doing. She knows the smooth feel of the buzzer she’ll press to be let into Owen’s apartment; she knows the expensive smell of his lobby and the clean scratch of his sheets.
Sylvie shrugs. “Not much,” she says, “just drinks with a friend. A good friend.” This last part she says with a smile that makes Siobhan’s scar ache and her eyes water.
Siobhan tells Keith she has a headache so that she can leave the Showroom before Sylvie. He frowns. There is a white smear on his collar that looks like toothpaste, and she focuses on that rather than his peering eyes. “You can go,” he says, “but let’s not have it happen again.”
She pulls on her coat over her polo and heads straight to Owen’s. He doesn’t sound surprised to hear her voice snaking down the intercom. When he greets her at the door, he looks nice, polished, in his white shirt and dark green chinos. He’s wearing shoes in his own house, and he smells like spice and citrus. There’s another smell coming from the kitchen: butter and garlic. He’s making fettuccine Alfredo. It’s almost six thirty. Sylvie will arrive in half an hour. Before Owen can speak, Siobhan smashes her mouth to his.
“I’m going to be in the bathroom,” she tells him when she pulls away. “I want to hear you with her.”
Owen stutters something in protest, and Siobhan knows this is too far, that he’s dangerously close to telling her to leave. She keeps a hand on his arm.
“I’ll just hide in the airing cupboard if she comes into the bathroom,” she says. “She won’t see me. And I’ll reward you after, I promise.”
He moves to one side, like she’s given him the answer to a riddle, and she steps into the flat. Siobhan heads straight for the bathroom, catching a glimpse of Owen’s worried face before closing the door. Siobhan looks at herself in the medicine cabinet. It’s bigger than the one she has at home, so she can see herself more clearly. The face looking back at her doesn’t feel like her own. It’s too strange, the cheekbones too prominent and the lips pale and chapped. She’s wearing a V-neck T-shirt, and if she looks closely, she can see that there’s a new mottling to the skin along her collarbones, a change in texture that makes her stomach twist. Suddenly, she wants rid of all of her clothes; she can no longer stand the feel of fabric on skin. She kicks off her shoes then peels off her T-shirt and leggings, her skin clammy and too warm, then pads across the room to the bath and climbs inside. The porcelain is cool. Her legs are almost too long for the tub, so she props her feet up by the brass taps, twisting one forwards and backwards with her big toe so that the cold water starts and stops again in spurts. She can’t look at her scar. She won’t. It feels like a black hole sucking everything else into it. It feels like it’s eating her from the inside. When she closes her eyes, she can see black shapes moving through the air, gliding, graceful and predatory.
Owen knocks on the door, asks if she’s okay. She doesn’t answer. Then there’s the sound of the buzzer ringing and Owen moving away from the bathroom door to answer it. Siobhan pretends she is deep under water, asfar away as possible from the sky and all the things it’s filled with.
Sylvie’s voice drifts into the flat and Siobhan’s body tightens at the proximity, though, of course, they sat even closer together earlier in the day. It is impossible to hear her properly from in here; her voice is too quiet and liquidy. It’s more impossible still that Siobhan has made all of this happen. She can hear them in the kitchen: Owen taking her coat, telling her he hopes she loves fettuccine Alfredo, that he’s thrilled she’s accepted the job at his production company.I just want to get to know you a bit better.
It is these things that tell Siobhan that her instinct is right, that she had been right about Owen since that first night she’d run into him at the cinema. She’d almost been able to smell it – that unshakeable belief in himself that, yes, he is a good person, a goodman, whatever that means, while all the time being just one push away from his true nature. From just taking whatever he wants, whenever he wants it, never even stopping to think of the powers and privileges he’s using to get it. There are worse men than Owen, she knows this. But somehow, this only makes it worse. It’s the insidiousness that she can’t take, the way his rotten parts have slipped in to sit so easily alongside all his goodness.He just can’t help himself, she thinks.He is a magpie, and she is so shiny.
“I don’t want to pressure you into anything,” she hears him saying. “This can be anything you want. It’s all under your control.”
When Siobhan closes her eyes, she can see herself pulling Owen away from Sylvie and her perfect skin and her bright future, with hands that aren’t hands at all, butsharp claws. She can see herself ripping into him – how good it would feel to undo all of his completeness, to muddy his perfect shirt with blood – picking at the flesh underneath his ribs. The heat from her scar has travelled upwards and outwards, consuming her whole body. Something has erupted from beneath the scar tissue.
When she opens her eyes, she is changed.
And in that second, Siobhan knows for the first time what she really is – what she has been all this time, what’s been lurking inside her since she left Hex House. The thing she couldn’t even admit to herself, let alone Theo. She is the thing that Haina had known she could be, had told her she could be, all those long afternoons in her study.
Hex, she whispers now, into the echoing quiet of the bathroom.Hex.
Only, there is an incompleteness to her; she feels lumpen, misshapen. She isn’t in her final form, then, not yet. As she rises from the bathtub, she watches black feathers shivering along her forearms. Her clawed feet click on the tiles. They are twisted and knobbly, agony to walk on, but she drags herself to the bathroom door and pushes it open. Her vision is fractured now – pinpoint sharp, black and white.
Siobhan is silent as she moves through the flat. Owen and Sylvie are still in the kitchen. She can see them through the open doorway. Sylvie is seated on a stool at the island and Owen is standing over her. He has one hand cupped under her chin, raising it. They are kissing. Both of their eyes are closed. They don’t see her. Siobhan goes instead into the lounge, low-lit by lamps, a candle flickering on the coffee table, making the room smell like smoke and vanilla. She stands near the sofa, and then with one sharp talon,tough as bone and the colour of old teeth, rips open one of the leather cushions so that the stuffing comes spilling out. She drags that same claw along the perfect wood of the coffee table, leaving a deep, pale mark, thinking about the scratches on the floor in Haina’s study.
“What’s that noise?” Sylvie says from the kitchen.
Siobhan can hear Owen’s heartbeat. It speeds up –thud thud thud– as if he is only now remembering what lurks in the house with them.
“Nothing,” he tells her.
With her long, pointed beak, Siobhan smashes one picture frame after another, sending the shattered glass falling to the floor.
