Unbreakable, p.11
Unbreakable, page 11
“She was beautiful.”
“She was.” Grace was crying, her words fractured and barely formed. “She was a nurse at the Royal. We’d been together for nine years before we married, and I loved her more than anything.”
Elin took the mug from her and passed her a tissue from a box on the coffee table. Grace blew her nose and then sneezed.
“Think those are a bit dusty,” she said as a cloud of motes erupted into the sunshine. “They’ve been there since…Well, it’s two years, and I keep meaning to make a decision, you know? Move back in or move on, but it’s easier said than done.”
“Where do you live now?” Elin asked, shaking off another tissue. Grace had stopped crying, but her nose was still streaming.
“I rent a flat near the hospital. I do a lot of shifts, so it’s just somewhere to rest my head.”
It wasn’t difficult for Elin to read between the lines, to imagine Grace’s life revolving around work and excessive overtime, and coming back to a flat devoid of anything that might connect her to her wife. Elin had taken a different but just as destructive path to deal with her own PTSD. By the sound of it, her months of sleeping around and day-drinking had been as effective a therapy as Grace’s avoidance tactics, and here she was rubbing salt into all of Grace’s wounds.
“We don’t have to stay here,” she said. Up until this moment, she hadn’t thought she could feel any worse for what she’d done to Grace, but she just kept digging a deeper hole for herself.
“I know we don’t.” Grace took the wedding photo from the coffee table and restored it to its original place above the fireplace. “But we’ll be safe here until we hear anything, and I don’t want to keep moving you if I don’t have to.”
Elin had to admit Grace made a good point. Now that she was sitting down, the prospect of getting up again wasn’t a pleasant one, and the Artex on the ceiling was starting to do weird things when she stared at it. She felt Grace unfasten her coat and managed to get her arms out of it before her head hit the back of the sofa again.
“That good, eh?” Grace said, lifting the drain clear of the shoulder bag and checking the IV cannula in Elin’s wrist. “Soup, fluids, and pain relief for you. Not necessarily in that order.”
“The phone.” Elin scrabbled for her coat, but it seemed to be miles away, and even when she got a hand on it, she couldn’t lift it.
“I’ll watch it, I promise.” Grace showed her its empty screen. “There’s nothing yet. What sort of soup do you like?”
“Tomato.” Elin’s bottom lip quivered. She had answered without thinking, and it was Amelia who always asked for tomato soup when she was poorly. Tomato soup, a warm knee, and a story. Grace pulled a tartan blanket from an armchair and tucked it around Elin in a gesture so sweetly familiar that it almost tipped Elin over the edge.
“Have a nap. I’ll wake you if anything happens,” Grace said, and a stinging sensation in Elin’s wrist was the last thing she knew for a while.
Grace. Saturday, 3:17 p.m.
The house—her house, Grace reminded herself—was quiet, with the fitful tick of a clock with a fading battery the only sound beside the occasional car passing on the street. On her previous visits to collect clothes or check the post she’d forgotten to redirect, she had felt like an intruder, a stranger invading a space that no longer belonged to her, and she had left again within minutes, locking the door and retreating to a place Charlotte had never set foot in. Today, though, the house seemed like a sanctuary, and after that first inevitable sucker punch of sorrow, she found she could sit on the sofa beside Elin, look at the photos in front of her, and wonder what the hell Charlotte would have said about all of this. “You’re a bloody idiot,” was the first thing that sprang to mind, but Charlotte had been far more impetuous than Grace, and she would have said that a beat before offering to roll up her sleeves and dig out the bullet.
“I dug the bullet out on my own, Lotty,” Grace whispered. She connected the IV tubing she’d been unravelling and set the transfusion to a steady rate. Elin had lost a further three hundred millilitres into the drain, and her most recent obs had been a blatant cry for help.
Elin twitched, murmuring something incomprehensible, and then woke all at once, her body jerking and her eyes flying open. She didn’t seem to have a clue where she was, but she relaxed upon seeing Grace, and then frowned at the blood bag hanging from a lampshade. “How bad?” She made a token effort to lift the drain into view but capitulated as soon as Grace intervened.
“It’s stopped. I’m just topping you up. That wall has more colour than you.”
“Ha.” Elin stuck two lazy fingers up at her. The wall in question was a subtle off-white.
“No news,” Grace said, before Elin could ask. “Unless you count me putting the soup on and changing into clothes that fit.”
“I like your T-shirt. It’s very nice.” Drowsing again, Elin sounded drunk, her words mashing together and her sentiment unguarded.
Grace tugged at the hem of the shirt, conscious that its fit was a little too snug, but all that did was tauten the cotton. Grateful that Elin was off her face on opiates and unlikely to remember a thing, she fussed with the transfusion until Elin slipped back into a doze. Most of her casual clothes—the stuff she could throw on at the end of a shift, the shapeless sweaters and jogging bottoms, and the T-shirts she’d almost worn the patterns off—were at her flat, where there was never anyone to see her and she was usually too tired to care about looking like something the cat had dragged in. As a consequence, the clothes still stored here had mostly been chosen by Charlotte, who would march her to Oxford Street for her yearly stock-up and refuse to go home unless Grace bought at least three different outfits. One of Charlotte’s favourite hobbies had been ogling Grace in dressing room mirrors, and she’d had excellent taste where fashion was concerned. The T-shirt in question, baby blue and flattering in all the right places, had definitely been one of her recommendations.
The scent of ersatz tomato sent Grace into the kitchen, where she lowered the heat on the hob and rummaged for a couple of bowls. As she stood there, a patch of sunlight passed over the garden, highlighting the swing bench she used to spend hours reading on in summer, and the raised bed Charlotte had never completed. She turned away from the window, directing all her attention to the soup, adding a drop of milk it didn’t need and putting a couple of slices of bread into the toaster. It was surreal to be doing this, preparing lunch for the near-stranger hooked up to the IV on her sofa, yet she couldn’t deny that part of her was glad to be hauled along, busily figuring out their next move and how she was going to keep Elin stable enough to make it.
By the time Grace had loaded a tray and returned to the living room, Elin was awake. Sitting up properly took her a while, but she managed without Grace’s assistance and then let Grace place the tray on her lap.
“Voila.” Grace settled on the adjacent armchair. “It shouldn’t be too hot.”
“Thanks.” Elin stirred the soup in slow circles, and Grace concentrated on her own bowl, inwardly wincing as Elin missed her mouth with the spoon. Elin swapped hands, trying again with her left, but she clearly wasn’t ambidextrous, and her second attempt was even worse, spilling the entire spoonful. The spoon clattered against the bowl as she lost her grip on it, and she immediately grabbed it again. “Why can’t I do this?” She looked at Grace, frustration and confusion rolling off her.
“Because you lost a hell of a lot of blood last night.” Grace slid the spoon from Elin’s fingers and set it aside. “And you may have nerve damage on that right side. You definitely have muscle damage. Here…”
Abandoning her lunch, she sat on the edge of the sofa and lifted the bowl to Elin’s lips. There was only the slightest delay before Elin relented and swallowed a couple of mouthfuls. She shook her head to let Grace know she was finished, and she was still shaking it as Grace lowered the bowl.
“I run an international company.” She sounded more bemused than anything. “I raised Amelia on my own, spent twelve years in the armed forces, and I can’t even hold a spoon.”
Grace parsed the information Elin had casually tossed into the mix and chose the least incendiary topic of the three. “Your company, you said it had offices in London and the UAE. How come you based yourself in Manchester?”
Elin shrugged. “I was born and bred there, I like it up there, and it’s my company. Lowry was happy to run the London office, and I’d come down every few weeks, unless there were any major problems.”
“Have you known him for long?” Grace asked, sensing there was more to their history than a mere business arrangement.
“He’s been my best friend for eighteen years. We were in Special Recon together.” Elin gave a sudden sharp laugh. “He’s not Amelia’s dad, if that’s what you were thinking.”
It wasn’t. It hadn’t even occurred to Grace. She had a pretty accurate gaydar, and it had been twitching for a while now. She could imagine Elin selecting the father of her child from a line-up of suitable donors and getting herself pregnant when she was good and ready.
“More soup?” she said.
Elin chuckled at the non-sequitur, and her fingers tangled with Grace’s as she helped Grace tilt the bowl.
“I should have got some cheese to melt into it,” Grace said. “That’s the best thing ever when you’re not well.” She had gone into the shop for essentials, rushing around the aisles and out again in record time. When one of the store assistants had said good morning to her, she had been so flummoxed by the sheer normality that she had almost fluffed her response.
“I prefer it without,” Elin said. “Mouse is the cheese freak in our house.”
“Amelia?” Grace vaguely recalled her using the name for Amelia earlier that morning, when she had been talking about the pizza delivery lad. “Is that where she gets the nickname, then?”
“No.” Elin pushed at the bowl, and Grace took the hint, moving it right away from her. “That’s not where it comes from.”
“Oh.” Grace faltered, curious but reluctant to pry. She wasn’t sure whether that was a full stop or an ellipsis at the end of Elin’s comment. “You don’t have to talk about her, Elin. Not unless you want to.”
“I adopted her.” Elin said it quickly, as if any pause would collapse the conversation. “I’d been thinking about it for a long time before I applied. I’d always wanted a child but never wanted to be pregnant. Does that sound weird?”
“Not especially. Lotty, Charlotte, was similar. She loved kids and she wanted to be a mum, but we’d already decided I’d be the one to carry them.”
“I had no one to make that decision with.” Elin stated it as a matter of fact, rather than something she was upset about. “I’d had relationships here and there but nothing I’d have wanted to bring a child into. I was newly single on the eve of my thirty-fifth birthday, and it seemed like a sign.”
A vehicle began to reverse slowly down the street, its engine audible before it came into view. They both turned to peer through the slatted window blinds, but it was a white van with a black woman at the wheel, and she drove right past the house. Though no one had been able to see in, Grace got up to close the blinds fully, which left them in semi-darkness even when she turned on a small side lamp.
Elin leaned forward, one hand supporting her bad side, and her face slipping further into shadow. The facade of anonymity seemed to help her pick up the thread. “Amelia was sixteen weeks old when I brought her home. And for the first month, I wondered what the hell I’d done. I’d fought so hard for her during the adoption process, and I’d been so sure I wanted her and so confident I could cope, but it went to shit almost at once.”
“Why?” Grace said, genuinely intrigued.
“I knew she’d been neglected by her birth parents, but I didn’t realise how badly until that first night I was alone with her.” Elin touched the burner phone Grace had left on the arm of the sofa. It was a habit she’d developed whenever she was most distressed, though she didn’t seem aware of it. The phone’s screen lit up, illuminating her haggard face, and then sent her back into the darkness.
“Social Services had told me she was an absolute angel,” she continued. “Quiet, slept through the night. It sounded too good to be true, and it was. She didn’t cry for weeks, Grace. No one had ever come to her when she cried, so she’d just given up. She was like a shell of a kid. It was as if she’d learned to be invisible, unless she heard a loud noise or a raised voice, and then she’d freeze, her eyes as wide as dinner plates, every bit of her tensed, waiting for the punch.”
“Poor little mite.” Grace was no stranger to dealing with abused children, and that thousand-yard stare was unmistakeable. “What on earth did you do?”
“Honestly? I spent the first couple of weeks wondering whether I could take her back.” Elin shook her head. “As if she was something I’d bought that didn’t fit right, but it was okay because I still had the receipt. And it would have been so simple to do that. I had all my excuses lined up and ready to go: it wasn’t what I imagined it would be, and I wouldn’t be able to change anything for the better, and she needed someone who was good at this, and that definitely wasn’t me.”
“But you didn’t do that,” Grace said. From the way Elin was speaking, she doubted Elin had ever admitted this to another soul.
“No, I didn’t. I was in such a fucking state, it took me a while to realise I’d adopted a kindred spirit and she had a form of PTSD. It was easier after that. I got better at avoiding the things that might spark her off, and figuring out what she liked and what seemed to help her. There wasn’t any major breakthrough, you know? One of those big moments you see on the telly, with the sun coming out of the clouds and the choir singing in the background? It was just a series of little things—she’d tug my hair, or her face would change when she saw me, not quite a smile but getting there, or she wouldn’t stiffen so badly when I held her.” Elin stopped. She had run out of air, and she was breathing hard. When she continued, her voice had dropped to a whisper. “The first time she cried, I felt like I’d won the lottery, and we never looked back. I told her once, when she was being naughty, ‘you used to be as quiet as a mouse,’ and she howled laughing at that and the name stuck.” Elin tilted her head. “It’s so quiet now without her. I can’t bear it being this quiet. I feel like there’s a piece of me missing.”
Grace couldn’t say anything in response. That feeling had been a constant for her over the past two years. She put her arm around Elin, felt Elin nestle against her shoulder, and sat with her in the silence.
Elin. Saturday, 4:45 p.m.
Take a deep breath. And another. Okay, that’s not too bad.”
Elin used her free hand to tuck in her T-shirt as Grace lowered it. Grace had done that thing where she’d rubbed the drum of her stethoscope to warm it, but it had still felt like ice on Elin’s back, and goosebumps mottled her arms. She had been cold to the bone for hours, and her jaw ached from clenching it to stop her teeth rattling. She must be anaemic, probably still skirting shock. She wasn’t sure how many transfusions Grace had given her, but they wouldn’t be enough if she continued to bleed, and Grace’s supply of blood and plasma was finite. She wrapped her arms across her chest, too overwhelmed to care that she was tangling the IV line. The last time she had gone to the toilet, it had taken her twenty minutes to get off it again.
“Here.” By contrast, Grace’s hands were deft and sure, unknotting the tubing and draping a blanket around Elin’s shoulders. She had an expert poker face, but tight worry lines creased her forehead and thinned her lips. “Do you want a hot drink?”
Elin did, but she was sure she would spill it. “No, thank you.”
Grace folded her steth back into her obs pouch. She had packed a small case for herself and propped it by the door, alongside any kit she wasn’t currently using and a bag of dried and tinned food scavenged from the kitchen cupboards. Keeping busy was clearly her way of coping, but there was nothing left for them to do now except wait for all hell to break loose around 6 p.m., when the HEMS car would be discovered. How long after that would the police start searching for Grace? They would no doubt go to the flat she rented first, but how long would it be before they came knocking on the door of this house?
Elin toyed with the burner phone. For her own sake, she was rationing the amount of times she refreshed its screen, and not being able to check it just in case was nagging at her like a toothache. “Maybe I should text him,” she said. “Do you think that would help? At least it’ll prove I’m still alive.”
“You could try.” Grace did a commendable job of hiding her scepticism. “But I’m sure they have a way to track this phone, so they’ll know you’ve left the hotel.”
“True.” Elin leaned sideward, resting her head against the sofa back. She hated this inertia, sitting helpless, waiting for orders and unable to seize the initiative. She’d had enough of that during her early army days, and she’d sworn never to return to a role where the greatest asset she possessed was her compliance.
When the phone suddenly buzzed, she jumped so hard that she knocked it to the floor.
“Fuck!” Forgetting the drain, she dived toward the carpet, but Grace met her halfway, one hand planted on her sternum to keep her still.
“I’ve got it,” Grace said, immediately proffering the phone to her. “Here.”
Elin shook her head. For all the hours of longing and wordless bargaining, she couldn’t bear to look at it now that it had something to say.
“Do you want me to?” Grace was holding the phone at arm’s length, as if it might go for her throat if she brought it any closer. When Elin made a faint noise of assent, Grace tapped the screen and opened the new WhatsApp message. “What the—” She cut herself off and read it again to be sure. “Fucking hell.”
