Page 8 of Inferno
She edged into the room, setting the soup down on the nightstand. ‘Sophie, please. I’m worried about you.’
I shook my head, squishing my cheek into my pillow. ‘Don’t be.’
It was almost like a ritual:Won’t you eat a little more, Sophie? Won’t you have a bite of this? Do you want to talk about it with someone? You’re not trying, Sophie. Please just try.
Her blue eyes were wired with red. She seemed tired, too. I felt her hand on my arm. ‘Will you drink some of this at least? It will help you to sleep well.’
‘You have it,’ I said, feeling myself sink. ‘Please.’
She stroked my hair, her voice quiet. ‘I will. I’ll have some too.’
I couldn’t lift my head even if I wanted to. My lids drooped shut and I fell, down, down, down into the blackness that was waiting to envelop me. The shadows swooped. The gunshots rang out.
I woke with a start. It was dark outside but my curtains were still open. The moon was high and full, the stars castingstreaks inside my room. Everything was silent. I wasn’t screaming. I wasn’t sweating. I hadn’t woken myself up and my mother wasn’t there, fretting by my bedside like she usually was.
She’s asleep,I realized with such a flood of relief it took me another second to notice the searing pain in my hand. I flicked on the light and stared in horror at the blood on my sheets.
The switchblade was open on my pillow, the knife slicked with my blood. Even the handle was stained, darker beads of crimson sinking into the grooves in the inscription. There was a three-inch gash running across the palm of my right hand. I had cut myself in my sleep!
It was bad enough to drench my sheets and wake me up. It was bad enough to give my mother a horrible jolt if she walked in just then. This was the only uninterrupted morsel of sleep she had gotten in weeks, and I sure as hell wasn’t about to ruin that.
I grabbed a T-shirt and tied it in a knot around my hand. I flicked the switchblade closed and stashed it in my drawer. I flipped the pillow over to its unbloodied side and crept downstairs. Every creak was a miniature heart attack, but my mother’s bedroom stayed silent as I descended. I would disinfect the wound, wrap it up and come up with an excuse for the injury tomorrow.
The kitchen door was ajar and the light had been left on, but it wasn’t until I reached the door that I heard the crying. I peeked through the crack. My mother was sitting at the table, her feet curled around the chair legs. She was dressed in her pyjamas, but it was easy to see she hadn’t been sleeping. Herhead was in her hands and her breaths were coming in violent, heaving gasps.
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 FIVETHE 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 ofAmerica’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 herhead, 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 wasrootingfor 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?’
