The Girl in the Water

This is a world I’m not willing to let fall apart.

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Not every den of torture looks like what we’re given to expect. Like what the storybooks tell us we should see there. It is possible that there are those which fit the stereotype: dark, damp stone walls with old chains hanging from hooks on the ceiling, the devices of abuse crusted with dirt and gore.

It’s possible.

But reality can be more hellish than those props. Strip away the myth, and what’s left behind – what’s left to be real – is something different. Something worse.

It’s a basement, though not because there is any particular power to darkness or to being underground. It’s a basement because basements bar sound better than ground-level living rooms, and though there isn’t usually that much noise involved in the way torture really works, one does want to guard against even the remotest possibilities.

It is furnished nicely, if simply. The carpeting is higher grade than discount, the walls are a muted tan. There are bookshelves with nondescript volumes – the kind that bespeak a degree of education but not an excess of wealth – and a small desk in one corner, with an old tube-style television on a table in another. The chequered fabric sofa with pull-out bed is the centrepiece of the wall to the right, as one enters, and the door itself is wood-panelled with a knockoff brass knob. The prefab sort with a lightly marked up, push-button lock.

The only sign of the room’s real purpose is the sturdy chrome bolt lock that’s been added above the knob. An ordinary basement den, with no windows or external exits, doesn’t have a deadbolt fitted towards the interior hallway. Especially not the kind that is key operated only, from both sides.

The kind that, once locked, keeps you in as well as out.

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Amber (#ulink_3e0e3070-455b-50dd-b63b-f43004edfcb9)

As all days do, the new one that began when the daylight crept over the hills has rolled through its usual routines. It’s brought the sun and home and work, but I haven’t been seeing them in a bright light. This day was inaugurated differently, and as it began, so it carried on.

Differently.

I arrived at work at 8.50 a.m. It should have been 8.30 a.m., and I should have been in better cheer, but there’s only so much control one can exercise over the ebbs and flows of life. I was late, grumpy, and had been praying solely for a lack of conversation and an empty path between the front door and my desk.

That I made it through Classical Fiction and New Releases en route to my periodicals corner, past the coffee kiosk, arriving at my desk without interruption, felt like the first bit of unmitigated good news of the day. My unusual tardiness meant the bookshop was already bustling with customers, and someone else had already gone through the day’s delivery packs, at least enough to get a few copies of the morning papers on the racks in time for the day’s first push. I’d probably end up being scolded for thrusting that role onto someone else by my absence, but I would simply have to face that.

Mitch had left a cup of tea on my desk, though his office at this moment was empty. I sighed, marginally disappointed with myself for being relieved, but I simply wasn’t in the right frame of mind to have interacted well if he’d been there in his usual cheer. When you’re in a pissy mood the cheerfulness of others is doubly revolting.

I popped the plastic lid off the Peet’s tea and drew in a long sip, taking advantage of the distraction to avoid the disorder of the boxes around me. The tea was tepid, but it still satisfied. It washed the latent coffee taste from my tongue, and with it a bit of the tension of the morning.

Then it was onto automatic pilot. Sorting. Shelving. Cutting boxes and recycling. Bringing order to the most changeable corner of the shop. Then, when it was all done, settling into the quiet that invariably followed. Reading the papers. Scanning the glossy magazines. Gold computer, open – the surest sign I was fully caught up despite my late arrival and could settle into the calm of the day. Eventually, a little chime announced that all was well with the technological innards of my laptop and the screen shifted to display the desktop. I called up my usual starting pages: AP, Reuters, The Times. All auto-refreshing to the day’s latest.

The rhythm of ordinary life in a low-intensity job is a decent tonic for anxiety, and it’s cheaper than Xanax. A comforting montage. This is my morning, I reflected, my every morning. It’s today’s, and it will be tomorrow’s.

It was yesterday’s.

I’d stiffened a little at that. The word didn’t feel right in my head. Yesterday. As if it weren’t an actual day.

Next to my computer, opposite the memos, was a little notepad. I’ve been repeatedly reminded I can take notes on the computer itself, but I suppose I feel the same way about paper and pen as I do about novels with covers and words on actual pages. On the cover of the notepad is a garishly pink Hello Kitty logo, augmented with purples and reds that only a colour-blind teenage girl could admire. I’d grabbed it out of a stationery shop’s discount bin a few weeks back without closely examining what I was buying, and every time I look at it now, it makes me feel ten years old and ridiculous.

I flipped open the cover.

Yesterday.

I tried to cast the word out of mind as I scanned over the few notes I’d written. They were all various jottings about that headline. Yesterday’s headline. The story that had so enrapt me.

Woman.

The shiver, again.

Thirty-nine.

White.

Suspicious circumstances.

The words, penned in my own hand, made me increasingly uneasy.

Cause of death unknown.

No match to any known missing persons.

Yesterday.

I shoved the notebook aside and stared at the newsfeed on the computer. Those jottings had been what yesterday was all about, and they’d started from a banner on this screen. The new day’s headlines were scrolling by now, though, at their usual rate, and I wasn’t spotting anything more about the body. I’d have thought there would be more stories by now. More information. I used the trackpad to move backwards through the listing by time, but it seemed to have disappeared from the day’s radar.

Then, disrupting the intensity that had been building up to this moment, comes Chloe – right now, as I’m focused on all this and the beginnings of the workday blend into the present.

Chloe: my closest friend at the bookshop. She’s one of the few under-thirties here, as eccentric in her own right as the rest of us combined. I halfway suspect she chose to work here because she is simply too weird to be hired anywhere else.

Her head pops into my personal space with her typical intensity. She, who is always brimming with exuberance and wit, and whom I absolutely do not want to see at the moment.

‘Hey girl!’ she announces, taking no notice of my condition. Her head is not quite bobbing, but almost. The pitch of her voice is entirely too high, and she stretches out the two words to a span of time that could easily have accommodated an entire sentence.

‘I thought I heard you sneakin’ on in here!’ Her affected accent is as shocking as always. Chloe’s most conspicuous failure of self-awareness is her apparent belief that she can simply will herself to become a busty black woman with a drawl that makes ordinary phrases sound charming and profound. The phenomenon emerged precisely at the time she went on an Idris Elba fan binge on Netflix, re-emerging from that two-week stint more Southern and succulent than any character he’s ever played. I’ve tried, on numerous occasions, to remind her that she’s more than a decade younger than me, from Oakland, B-cup at the most optimistic, and on her very best day a pasty white that most bleach brands would set as a target for the ‘after’ of their comparison washing ads. But that’s just how she is. Chloe’s quirkiness is inflexible, and her friendship comes at you like an out-of-control freight train, or it doesn’t come at all.

At the moment, I’d give anything for the latter option. The tension in my neck is fierce, and with an as-yet unexplained urgency, I desperately want to get back to reading about … whatever this story of the woman in the water is.

‘What’s wrong, hon?’ Chloe flaps her lashes with the question, broadcasting the mildest irritation that I’ve not yet acknowledged her presence.

‘It’s nothing, Clo.’ A horrible abbreviation for her name, but I’ve never thought up anything better. ‘Just distracted with my own stuff. Can we talk later?’

Her look is unreadable. For a moment there are hints of disappointment, then pouty annoyance and the threat of an even poutier resentment. It eventually morphs into a tight smile, though she speaks through barely moving teeth. ‘Sure, if that’s what you need. If, you know, your stuff is so important.’

She stresses the words with mock disdain, but disappears behind a bookshelf and pretends to be busy with re-organising the stock there before I face the delicate task of replying.

The headlines on my screen have kept scrolling. There’s still nothing about the girl in the river.

In the river.

Last night bursts back into my head. And this morning. The way things weren’t supposed to be.

This morning, from the moment I awoke, David was different. His movements were different. He lingered longer than usual before he left for work, petering about upstairs, in his third-storey ‘home office’, with whatever it is he works on in there. Usually it’s only a few minutes – ‘Just grabbing my things, then out the door …’ – but not today. Today he changed his routine. And David is not a man who changes his routine.

I would swear he was trying to avoid me, hiding himself away in a spot he knew I didn’t go. Trying to move through our apartment unseen so he didn’t have to lay eyes on …