Slow River

Bright light floods the tent from outside as someone rips open the flap. “Up. Now.” It is Fishface, but Lore hardly recognizes him, his voice is so harsh. “I said now.” He steps menacingly toward the sleeping bag and Lore wriggles out hastily, nail tucked in her left fist, out of sight. He grabs her arm. “We’re leaving.”

“Did they pay?”

He does not answer.

Lore looks around her as they head across the old floor-boards she has only been able to feel with her fingertips. It is a barn, very old. Hundreds of years old, probably.

Outside the night is cool and clear. The smell abruptly changes, and she knows she is in a northern European country—England, perhaps, or Ireland—and that the scents of garlic and sun permeating the inside of the barn are a trick. So much pla

She shivers as Fishface marches her across a cobbled yard toward a pair of headlights. Some sort of vehicle. Lore moves slowly, docilely: she is supposed to be drugged, and she needs to think.

They are now only forty yards from the vehicle. It is an off-track van, the kind with doors that open at the back. The doors are open. She does not want to climb in.

They are going to kill her, She is sure of it. Old farm equipment lines the stone walls of the yard. She can smell the rusting metal.

They are almost at the van now. She can see someone inside, programming directions into the instrument panel. Crablegs. The floor of the van is covered in plasthene. To catch the blood? She maneuvers the nail into position in her fist.

They are at the van. Crablegs is standing at the lip, holding out his arms to her. Fishface is behind her. He moves his hands from her arms to her waist, not gripping now, just getting into position to boost her up and inside.

Lore pretends to stumble. As she knows he would, Fishface reaches to catch her. She turns fast, nail in fist.

His eyes are brown. The look that flares behind them is part shock at her speed, part fear, part a strange kind of acceptance: she will kill him. That nearly undoes her. But her fist is already swinging in its short arc. He doesn’t move. The nail rips into his neck and blood fountains. They tumble into metal. Something sharp. Bright pain. Blood splashes on her face, her arms, her throat, in her hair. She is screaming. Crablegs is screaming. Fishface is silent.

Shock makes all the rest hazy, unreal, underwater slow-motion: the van, the shouting, then silence as the van rumbles through the night. The long sigh, the hissing nasal spray creeping across the air between her and Crablegs molecule by molecule, deadly.

And breathing it in, sucking it down, tumbling backward out of, the van while it’s still moving is a rite of passage. She could have died. She should have died. She moves from one life, from Frances Lorien van de Oest, to another, arriving—as all newborns do—naked and covered in blood.

Chapter 27

I set the Hammex 20 up on its tripod and sat opposite, in the chair beneath the window. The camera lens was like a cold fish eye, unblinking. I stared at it, forgetting what I was supposed to say. The reflection of a bird flying past my window flashed in the glass eye and made me jump.

I cleared my throat. “When I was seven, someone tried to sexually abuse me. I think it was my mother…”

I talked for hours, occasionally sipping water from the glass next to me. I told the camera about Greta helping with the lock, about Stella killing herself, about Tok calling me in Uruguay. I told the camera everything I could remember about my kidnap; about Fishface and Crablegs and the tent; how they had known I was allergic to spray-injector drugs; what they had said and how they had said it. I talked about the nail.

When I found I was talking at great length about the qualities of the nail—how it smelled, how it felt in my hand, how big it was—I turned the camera off, used the bathroom, made myself some tea.

When I resumed, I was much more terse. “So when they took me outside, I thought they were going to kill me. I tried to escape. In the course of that escape attempt, one—the one I called Fishface—was seriously hurt. Then I was bundled up into a van.” I described the van as well as I could. “Crablegs threatened to kill me. He tried, with some kind of nasal spray. I got away. I was hurt, naked, alone. I was helped by a stranger.”

That’s what Spa

“I illegally took the PIDA from the corpse of a woman called Sal Bird, who had died, I was told, in a swimming accident in Immingham. I worked at Hedon Road Waste-water Treatment Plant.” I gave my address and phone number. I explained about the sabotage; about Meisener; about Montex and the van de Oest corporation and Greta. “I think Lucas Chen has been abducted by the same persons as myself three years ago.”

I thought about saying more, but there wasn’t any point. This was only to give them enough to start with while I was. dealing with my family and dodging the glare of publicity. No doubt I would spend hours closeted in some grim-looking police station while being politely interviewed by the officer or officers in charge. For all that I had done, I had never seen the inside of a police station. The idea frightened me.

On the other side of the window, neon in shopwindows and the sodium of streetlights were blinking on. The flat was gray and shadowy beyond the camera flood. I should really stand up and make some calls: tell Ruth and Ellen the truth before the net caught the story; let Tom know that the building would be swarming by this time tomorrow. Maybe he had a relative he could stay with for a day or two.

I just sat there, hands and feet getting cold, watching the camera light grow more sharp-edged as the shadows in the flat turned from gray to black.

It was spring again. Lore had been prostituting her body for more than a year. All that money. She lay there for a long time, stroking the quilt, dunking, finally admitting to herself what she had known, on some level, all along. That evening, as they were preparing to go out to meet more customers, Lore sat down on the rim of the bathtub.

“How much does it cost?”

“Hmm?” Spa

“The drug. How much does it cost?” Spa

“We’ve been earning an average of six thousand a week for more than a year. That’s more than three hundred thousand-”

“I can count.”

“-and where has it gone?” Lore stood up, took the hairbrush from Spa

“To earn-”

“The truth!”

“That is the-”

“But not the whole truth, is it? Yes, we’ve been letting old ladies watch while you sodomize me; you’ve tied me up while some executive jerks off because it’s his birthday; I’ve had to watch while you piss on some jaded couple. For what?” Lore was pacing up and down now, hairbrush still in her hand. “And don’t tell me money. It’s the drug. I thought the drug was to make our lives bearable while we made money the only way we knew how. But that’s not it at all, is it? I got it all backward. That was never the point. The whole point was the drug. The whole point was what you and I did while we took the drug. Because you like it. Deep down inside, you like it.”

“You do, too. Otherwise you wouldn’t be doing it.”