Follow You Home (23 page)

Perhaps they thought they had done enough. She clenched her fists, digging her nails into her palms. Pathetic. Because she was still here. They were home, safe and well. And she had no doubt she was going to die here, the sow, slaughtered in an abattoir.

Chapter Forty-Seven

I
on sat on his bed back at home in Sibiu. The first thing he’d done when he returned, exhausted and dispirited, was call for his cat outside. But after two months, the creature had no doubt found someone else to feed it.

After meeting the helpful policeman, Constantin, he had gone to Bucharest to look for Alina. According to the cop, Alina had been in Breva shortly after the incident on the train. The cop, who seemed much nicer than the bastards back home, went and spoke to the guy in the ticket office at the station who remembered selling a ticket to Bucharest to a girl matching Alina’s description.

So Ion had gone to Bucharest. By this point, seven weeks had passed. Progress in the city was slow. He trudged around bars a
nd see
dy nightclubs, showing Alina’s photograph to club-goers and doormen. A week in, a heroin addict Ion met in a hostel said he was sure he had seen this girl dealing drugs, he wasn’t sure what exactly, at a club called Sapphire in a district called Dristor. Ion wasted another week hanging out at this sleazy place, but there was no sign of her, and no one else had seen her. Ion realised the heroin addict had been lying.

Then something really shitty happened. He attracted the attention of a group of local gangsters, who wanted to know what he was doing, if he was trying to muscle in on their turf. They beat him up, put him in hospital for two weeks. As soon as he felt better, when he no longer needed painkillers every four hours, he came home.

Shattered and sick of the fruitless search, he spent the last o
f hi
s money on a bag of industrial-strength skunk and holed up with
his Xbo
x. He could have stayed like that until hunger forced him out to find a job, to get on with life.

And then Camelia had called him.

‘So,’ she said. ‘Did you find her?’

He groaned into the phone. ‘No. She’s vanished from the face of the earth. A policeman in Breva—’

‘Where?’

‘It’s this shithole in Transylvania. He told me that he’d seen her, that she went to Bucharest. But I might as well have been searching for a virgin on—’ He named the housing estate where he and Camelia had grown up.

‘Fuck.’ She sighed, then switched into a tone of voice he knew well. The sweet, seductive Camelia. ‘Can I ask you a favour? Can you lend me some money?’

He roared with laughter. ‘I’m skint, Camelia. I have no money. An eviction notice came yesterday. I’m going to have to get a j
ob. Lu
ckily I know a lot of dealers but . . .’

She cut him off. ‘I’ve got some money issues myself,’ she said. ‘You know I owe a lot of money to the guys who helped get me over here? I’ve been paying them off by working at the club. Now they’re saying they want their money back faster. They want me to go on the game.’

‘Right.’

‘To become a prostitute, Ion.’

‘That’s . . . bad?’

‘Fuck you,’ she spat. She sounded like she was on the verge of tears. He waited while she gathered herself. ‘So. Have you found any evidence that Alina sold the stuff? Or that she’s been trying to sell it?’

‘No. None.’

‘Shit. Maybe I was wrong. Perhaps the English couple did bring it back here after all.’

‘But you said . . .’

‘Yes,’ she snapped. ‘I know what I said. I thought that was the most likely explanation . . . Hello, are you still there?’

‘Yes. I’m just wondering. If Alina didn’t take the stuff, what’s happened to her? Where is she?’

‘I don’t fucking know. But I bet our English friends do. I thought you’d be able to find Alina, that she’d leave a trail like some kind of punk slug. But now . . . the Brits are all we have. Our last chance of getting that money. Do you agree?’

Ion nodded.

‘Well?’

‘Sorry, I was nodding yes.’

She made an exasperated sound. ‘I’m desperate, Ion. If I can’t get my hands on some cash quickly I’m going to have to run.’ Now she began to cry, a sound Ion couldn’t bear. ‘I don’t know what I’m going to do.’

‘Come on, calm down.’

‘You’ve got the keys to their place, haven’t you? Send them to me. When they’re out, I’ll go in, take a look around. Even if I don’t find the stuff they must have loads of things I could sell. T
he gu
y looks like the type who’d have a top-of-the-range computer. She’s probably got jewellery. There might be cash lying around.
Please, Ion.’

He agreed to call her back then looked around the room, at the filthy carpet, the crappy furniture, the eviction notice lying face-down on the side table. He thought about how he was going to have to start selling drugs for some jerk who would treat him like a slave. But could he scrape together the fare to England? Maybe if he went by train. It would take a lot longer, but if he sold his Xbox, the remainder of the weed, went to visit his aunt and helped himself to some of her jewellery . . .

He cursed the idea that he’d wasted the past three months. But Camelia was right. The Brits must know something. He went online and searched English news reports. There was nothing about a
British
pair returning from Europe and handing in a haul of cocaine, and he was sure that would have made the news. He knew they hadn’t been arrested at customs. That meant there was still a chance they had the cocaine or, if they’d sold it, the money. It was better than sitting around here doing nothing. And at the end of it, there was a chance he’d be rich.

He’d always wanted to see England too.

‘Hold off,’ he said, when he called Camelia. ‘I’m coming over. Your knight in shining armour.’

Chapter Forty-Eight

T
oday was the day she was going to do it. Put an end to it. She giggled at the thought of his face when he came into the room and found her lying in a puddle of her own blood. What would he do? Would he cry? The notion made her giggle again, the laughter bubbling through her like water surging through an unblocked pipe. For months, laughter had s
eemed like someth
ing she would never experience again—like beer and pizza and soft sheets and shopping and bus rides and hair
dye an
d friends and beaches and TV and books and music and cuddles and happiness. But now, now she’d started, she couldn’t stop.
Blood, blood, glorious blood
, she sang to herself, changing the words to an English song she’d heard when she was a little girl, and she stroked the veins on her wrists and wondered it if would hurt and whether she’d care. And as suddenly as it started, the giggling stopped.

She had lost count of how long she’d been here. After the old man came and took Luka away (little Luka—she couldn’t remember what he smelled like anymore; could barely recall what he looked like), she’d stopped counting sunsets. All the days, the long-short days, blurred and warped and ran together like a painting in the rain. All she knew was that it had got colder and colder in the room, that even with all the blankets wrapped around her she still shivered. She was sure Christmas had come and gone. It was a new year now.

She spent every day lying on the bed, fantasising about revenge. The cop, Constantin—she would push him from a great height onto spiked railings; they would pierce his arsehole, disembowel him while she shook with laughter. Laura and Daniel, for their pathetic attempts to save her—she would make him watch while she slit Laura’s throat and bathed in her blood, and then she would cut off his cock and make him eat it before hammering a nine-inch nail into his puny chest. The old man, whom she hadn’t seen for ages—he had a very special punishment awaiting him. She whiled away the hours daydreaming about sulphuric acid and knives and vinegar and ropes and hammers and pliers. Sometimes, she became aware that she was speaking her fantasies aloud—and that the monster was listening, excited by what he heard, pulling off his clothes. Those were the worst times.

The monster climbed into her bed every two or three days, more frequently in the middle of the month. While he did his thing—it never took very long—she imagined them in Hell together. But he would be a condemned soul and she would be a fallen angel, one of Satan’s army, and they would spend an eternity of torture and suffering together.

Every day she hoped he would kill her so she could go to Hell and wait for him.

Sometimes when he was on top of her, she would look over his shoulder and watch a crack appear in the centre of the dim room, a tear in the fabric of the world, throbbing at the edges, and she would imagine herself stepping through it, escaping this world. In these visions, she didn’t go to Hell but back to her old life, the city, and she would run through the streets, dodging traffic, laughing, dazzled by the lights and drunk on lovely exhaust fumes. The monster couldn’t follow her there. Sometimes the crack appeared when he wasn’t around, during her daily forty-five minutes of freedom, but when she stepped towards it, it would seal, like it had been zipped shut, and vanish.

Her period had come again this morning. Dragoș hadn’t seen it yet. He came into her room, as always, at first light, with her breakfast on a tray. Water and porridge. He unfastened the clamps that held her ankles in place and left the room, allowing her forty-five minutes to exercise and wash. She knew he would inspect her when he came back, to see if she was pregnant. The blood disgusted him. She, as a woman, disgusted him. She could see it on his face. That must be why he never stayed to watch her when she washed or used the toilet—lucky, because her bladder would have exploded by now.

For a while after Luka was taken she had thought that maybe she could make him like her, feel some affection for her. Maybe she could persuade him to let her go. But when she talked to him it was as if she was speaking a foreign language; he didn’t react. She kept trying, telling him about herself, her family, trying to make herself more human, to create a bond. Until one morning as she was speaking he punched her in the mouth and split her lip. She didn’t talk to him again after that. She hadn’t spoken for weeks.

Alina washed and used the toilet in the corner of the room. How long did she have left before he came back and chained her up again? Not long. She needed to act now. She started giggling again when she pictured him finding her, but forced herself to stop.
Blood, blood, glorious blood
looped in her head and the crack hovered in the centre of the room, luring her with its fake promise. She ignored it. There was only one way out of here.

She crossed to the window and listened. The forest was still, the birds silent. The house was silent too. Usually around now she would hear a toilet flush somewhere in the house. The monster taking his morning dump.

The window was covered by three rough, vertical boards, each one nailed to the window frame at each corner. A sloppy job. The nails hadn’t been driven all the way in. For weeks now, during this forty-five minute period, Alina had been working on the middle board, alternately tugging at its edges and gripping the heads of the nails securing it and pulling on them, ignoring the pain in her fingertips. For days, none of the nails had shifted at all. But, like the sea eroding a pebble, she worked at it repeatedly until, one morning, the first nail moved a fraction. Encouraged, she redoubled her efforts until another budged, and then another, and then the last. She had to go slowly, working at loosening each nail’s hole so that it could not only be pulled out but pressed back into p
lace wit
h her aching thumbs so the monster wouldn’t notice anything. With all of the nails loosened, her leverage on the board increased, and increased yet again when she could get her fingers behind i
t and pro
perly work at it.

And then, yesterday morning, the board and all its nails came free in her bloodied hands.

She had kissed it, a tear rolling down her cheek.

Now, it was time.

She pulled the nails out and tugged the board away from the window. Just as it had when she had first glimpsed it yesterday, the beauty of the scene beyond brought tears to her eyes. The snow-tinged trees, the clouds, the sky. She had thought she would never see the world again. It hurt her eyes and a line from a poem came to her, tumbling out of her subconscious.
Beauty is nothing but the beginning of terror
. She stood transfixed for a moment then heard a toilet flush in the bowels of the house and was startled into action.

She went to the bed and pulled the filthy sheet from the mattress. It was easy to tear a strip off; she wrapped it around her hand and went back to the condensation-streaked window. She raised her fist and punched the glass between the remaining boards as hard as possible.

The window shook but didn’t shatter.

Taking a deep breath, she tried again. This time the window broke, a crack snaking across its middle. Panting slightly, Alina pressed against the glass, both hands wrapped in the sheet now, until a section fell away, bouncing down the outside of the house. She caught her breath, certain he would hear, that he would come running and stop her. But the house was silent. With her fingers still inside the sheet, Alina tugged at the broken glass, pulling away a perfect shard.

With a final glance towards the door, and the empty
cot, she coun
ted to three, determined to do it before she lost
courage. Sh
e couldn’t stay here any longer, not one more single day,
and she clo
sed her eyes as she sliced the glass across her arm a
nd watc
hed the blood as it flowed from her and dripped on the floor, watched it like it was somebody’s else’s arm, somebody else’s vein.

She crumpled to the ground.