Saturday: Jess

Saturday

Jess

My throat hurts and there’s an oily sweat on my forehead. I stare up at the high ceiling above me and try and work out where I am. Now I remember: getting here last night . . . that scene in the courtyard a couple of hours ago. It was still dark out so I got back into bed afterward. I didn’t think I’d be able to sleep but I must have drifted off. I don’t feel rested though. My whole body aches like I’ve been fighting someone. I think I was fighting someone, in my dream. The kind you’re relieved to wake up from. It comes back to me in fragments. I was trying to get into a locked room but my hands were clumsy, all fingers and thumbs. Someone—Ben?—was shouting at me not to open the door, do not open the door,but I knew I had to, knew I didn’t have any other choice. And then finally the door was opening and all at once I knew he was right—oh why hadn’t I listened to him? Because what greeted me on the other side—

I sit up in bed. I check my phone. Eight a.m. No messages. A new day and still no sign of my brother. I call his number: straight to voicemail. I listen to the voicenote he left me again, with that final instruction: “Just ring the buzzer. I’ll be up waiting for you—”

And this time I notice something strange. How his voice seems to cut off mid-sentence, like something has distracted him. After this there’s a faint murmur of sound in the background—words, maybe—but I can’t make anything out.

The uneasy feeling grows.

I walk out into the main living space. The room looks even more like something from a museum in the light of day: you can see the dust motes hanging suspended in the air. And I’ve just spotted something I didn’t see last night. There’s a largish, lighter patch on the floorboards just a few feet before the front door. I walk toward it, crouch down. As I do the smell—the strange smell I noticed last night—catches me right at the back of the throat. A singe-the-nostrils chemical tang. Bleach. But that’s not all. Something’s caught here in the gap between the floorboards, glinting in the cold light. I try to wiggle it out with my fingers, but it’s stuck fast. I go and get a couple of forks from the drawer in the kitchen, use them together to pry it loose. Eventually, I work it free. A long gilt chain unspools first, then a pendant: an image of a male saint in a cloak, holding a crook.

Ben’s St. Christopher. I reach up and feel the identical texture of the chain around my neck, the heavy weight of the pendant. I’ve never seen him without it. Just like me, I suspect he never takes it off, because it came from Mum. Because it’s one of the few things we have from her. Maybe it’s guilt, but I suspect Ben’s almost more sentimental about stuff like that than me.

But here it is. And the chain is broken.