Chapter 32

32

Staying sane is a trick.

It's a technique: sanity is something you hold on to – loosen your grip for too long, allow your mind to go to the places it fears, or the places it craves, and you risk letting it slip away. There are things that, for the sake of your sanity, you do not allow yourself to recall.

Grace remembers that afternoon in the studio, the terror and the thrill of it. The excitement she felt when she slipped the clay cutter around that man's neck and pulled. The sounds he made, so stirring: his cry of surprise, the roar of anger that followed, the choking sound he made as she drew her hands together, cinching the wire tight. She remembers the wave of exhilaration washing over her as his knees buckled, the ecstasy of control she felt as she pulled, tighter and tighter, the wire cutting into his throat, blood dripping on to the collar of his overalls. She remembers the desire – oh, it was almost overwhelming – to draw the noose tighter still when Vanessa left her alone, when she ran to the house to call the police. Grace longed to punish him as he deserved to be punished. She resisted: not out of mercy but out of fear, the fear of what Vanessa might think of her, the fear that Vanessa might truly see her for who she was.

Grace remembers the days and weeks and months after Julian went missing, how difficult Vanessa became: irrational, secretive, strange. Silent. She lied to the police, she would not explain to Douglas or the newspapers why she'd withdrawn from the show, she didn't work, didn't walk, didn't swim in the sea. She sat in the kitchen, hunched over an ashtray, smoking, listening to the phone ring and ring until eventually one day she ripped it out of the wall and hurled it out the window.

Grace brought food. She cooked meals that went uneaten, she cleaned and tidied and sorted through the mail. She lied, as required, to the police, to anyone who asked: she stuck to Vanessa's version of events.

In the first week of the new year, six months after Julian's visit, Grace drove to Carrachan to buy a new phone. She was plugging it in in the kitchen when Vanessa turned from the window and looked at her, looked at her as she hadn't done for months. ‘Why are you always here?' she asked. ‘Every time I turn around, there you are, with your soup and platitudes. I don't want you here.' Grace felt a shrivelling inside her, a chill, bone-deep. ‘I never wanted you here.'

‘That's not true,' Grace said. She stood up straight, her voice and her gaze level. ‘Vanessa, you know that's not true.'

Vanessa put out her cigarette and immediately lit another. ‘No, you're right,' she said, sighing, picking at the dry skin on the palms of her hands. ‘It's not true. I did want you here.' She blinked, slowly. Her eyes, when they met Grace's, were as cold as the January sea. ‘And now I don't.'

Grace remembers sitting on the faded orange chair next to Vanessa's bed. It was noon, but the room was dim, the curtains drawn against the light. Vanessa was cursing the sound of the sea. ‘I can't stand it, I can't stand it,' she kept saying, ‘it's driving me mad, I can't shut it out.'

Grace had barely slept in two days, she was frazzled, at the end of her rope. ‘I can't stop the tide, Vanessa. Use the ear plugs I gave you, here, come on—'

‘Leave me alone!' Vanessa hissed, slapping her hand away. She was mean and feral, half-mad with pain, poison spilling from her lips. ‘Let me go, you ugly old bitch, why won't you let me go? Boule de suif , boule de suif , he was right! He was right about you. You're dragging me down, keeping me here against my will, imprisoning me. You won't let me go! Why won't you let me go?'

Staying sane is a trick.

If Grace allows herself to think about it, she wonders whether in the end she gave Vanessa the extra dose of morphine to ease her pain, or just to shut her up.