Chapter Twenty Four

They made her go to bed – well past two in the morning – and took the folder of clippings away.

“You have two performances tomorrow,” Sumi told her, with absolutely none of the cheek or the attitude she usually dealt. She pressed a glass of water into Toks’ hand and popped two painkillers into her palm. “Take these or you’ll never sleep.”

Toks looked at her – eyes too wide, her body numb. She knew sleep was impossible.

“Try,” Sumi whispered. She actually pushed Toks gently down into the bed and tucked her in. Toks definitely didn’t deserve her. “It will all be okay, Toks. You can do this.”

She closed the door softly behind her.

Toks could do this. This was just history and swallowing the bitter pangs of guilt. This was the easy part. Polly was the one who had been through the worst.

She blinked at her phone in the darkness, knowing Polly was still in the air. She sent messages anyway.

— Darling, I’m sorry. I’m so, so sorry. For everything —

Nothing. One grey tick. A tiny pixelated symbol of half a lifetime of miscommunication.

— Are you ok? How are you feeling? —

Useless words when all she wanted was to wrap Polly in her arms forever and never let her go.

If Polly wanted her, of course.

— I’m worried about you. I wish I could be with you. Please let me know you’re ok —

They’d been so good together the past few weeks. Toks had felt time rewind – a window open on a life that might have been, and every hope in her heart singing for it to become an ever after. She’d been happy – and damn it, it had felt so good, so right, it had burned away sixteen years of misery so totally Toks could almost forget they’d even happened.

But better than that, better than her own happiness, had been Polly’s. She squeezed her eyes shut and remembered how beautiful Polly looked asleep in her arms. She was humbled by the peace she knew Polly had found there. How she’d slept through the night and marvelled at it.

“You’re so good for me,” Polly said. “I could sleep forever next to you.”

Toks wasn’t above boasting. “Three orgasms will do that. Any time, baby.”

Polly slapped her ribs and nuzzled closer. “You think you’re so good.”

“You just said I was!” Toks protested.

She felt Polly’s grin against her skin. “You are,” she whispered.

Toks wrapped that memory up tight and clung to it.

She had to say the rest, as contemptible as it was.

— Pearl, I didn’t know. I honestly didn’t know, and I’m so ashamed of myself. I don’t know how to make this better and I know a text message isn’t the way to do it, but if you will have me, I will be on a plane as soon as I can be. Please let me beg for your forgiveness in person —

And then…

— I love you —

That wasn’t enough either.

— You’ve always had my heart, even every day of those sixteen years when we were apart. I want you to have it still —

Her messages stayed resolutely unread and they blurred as Toks’ eyes filled with tears again and the phone went dark.

Sometime just before dawn, she finally slept.

She was woken by the warm aroma of fresh-baked bread and the clatter of cutlery.

Her head felt awful. She rolled onto her back and felt her brain collide against the inside of her skull. Her chest ached with a heavy blend of regret, remorse, grief and self-disgust. She had no idea how she was going to lead her orchestra today, much less touch her fingers to the piano and play a concerto. In truth, for the first time in forever, she didn’t care about the music at all. All she cared about was Polly.

She grabbed her phone.

No messages.

She breathed in patience. She couldn’t rush this. She couldn’t make demands, or push or tease like she might normally. Whatever time and space Polly needed, Toks would do her best to grant it. She wanted to help Polly heal.

Waiting wouldn’t be easy, though.

She pulled on clothes and padded out to the kitchen.

Magpie and Sumi had stayed the night – Magpie in the guest room, Sumi crashed on the couch – and Toks felt oddly touched by their presence. Someone had laid on a spectacular breakfast too, and that felt strange as well. She wasn’t used to someone looking after her. Not with this level of care. Toks had been alone for too long.

Artis swept her into a hug when he saw her, but her cousin regarded her warily. He looked like she felt – red eyes, an awful guilt haunting both of them.

“You were there,” Toks croaked. She had to cough and start again.

He nodded. “Only at the end.”

“Does that make it better?”

Magpie tapped a knife against her coffee cup. “Easy, darls. Get some tucker in you. Let him tell you the rest.”

They sat in the sunlight that streamed through her open windows and ate breakfast. The busy-ness of everyday people out in Harmony Square drifted in on the breeze – runners and dog-walkers, artists and booksellers setting up their stalls, a few early groups of tourists keen to beat the crowds. The sounds of peace. Toks ate croissants with raspberry jam and watched the scene without seeing. She listened to Nikoloz talk about the horror of a war sixteen years dead.

He’d been a lieutenant in his father’s personal detail – a branch of the Securitate that oversaw some of the regime’s worst atrocities. He’d been sheltered from most of them – young, privileged and clueless, and very definitely the mummy’s boy he knew the rest of his regiment had mocked him for behind his back. But when Ratimir Vass fell, his father saw his own chance, and dragged Nikoloz along with him. Seizing some western foreigners to use as bargaining tools had seemed a clever manoeuvre.

Until Nikoloz had been faced with the reality of it.

“Things went badly from the beginning,” he said, grim and low. “My father was furious. We still held the palace – tentatively – and my father’s men secured the streets around the Kjarta Harmonja and the Dom. The people set up barricades. It was a siege in the middle of Severin. The hostages – I mean, your friend Polly and the others – were taken to the Dom, and after he’d made them sweat, my father made his ransom to the British and Australian governments.”

“Made them sweat?” Toks was arch. From the scars she’d seen on Polly’s body, ‘making them sweat’ was hardly an appropriate euphemism.

“I meant the governments.” Nikoloz didn’t shy away from her gaze. “Ksenia, I’m sorry, but he did much worse to the hostages themselves.”

Magpie fished through Draga’s pile of clippings. She pulled out pages from once-glossy magazines – the trashies, Toks couldn’t help but notice. Gossip rags. “Both the Australian and the British governments took a hardline approach,” she said. “‘We don’t negotiate with terrorists.’ That tired old bullshit they think keeps their hands clean. And the right-wing media didn’t help either.”

Toks tried to focus on the glossies. Pure sensationalist garbage that painted Polly and the other Aussie hostages as irresponsible youth, unemployed backpackers, smoking and drinking their way across Europe rather than settling down and getting real jobs. The young man had Korovinjan heritage so they took the untrustworthy immigrant angle with him, but for Polly they’d managed to dig up a photo from a college party Toks barely remembered. Polly was nineteen and as free as she was beautiful, and she had a vodka cooler in one hand and a joint in the other. Toks snorted.

“But she hates the stuff,” she cried. “This must have been the only time she ever indulged. It makes her sleepy, for heaven’s sake! Where did they get this? They’re making her out to be some kind of drug mule. They’re suggesting she deserved this! Who—?”

“Settle.” Magpie patted her hand. “They were stirring up shit because the alternative was too awful to contemplate. But as disgraceful as it is, it goes some way to explaining why our governments dragged their heels.”

Nikoloz nodded. “When the foreign governments didn’t respond, my father ordered the execution of the first hostage. And the waiting game began.”

The words washed over her. Toks wrapped her hands around the coffee Sumi put in front of her and let the heat burn her palms. Niki ducked his head and explained how it got so much worse for the hostages once it became clear the Australian and British governments weren’t going to negotiate and weeks wore on. The soldiers tortured the men and took their frustrations out on the women.

Toks’ head snapped up.

Tilda!

Of course. She couldn’t believe she hadn’t made the connection earlier.

Tilda was a child of rape.

She sobbed – a huge, sucking ugly sound she couldn’t stop, and before she knew what she was doing, she launched herself at her cousin, exploding out of her chair, scattering their breakfast, sending plates clattering against coffee cups.

Everyone jumped up at once.

“Toks!”

“Maestro, please!”

But she didn’t hear them. She hammered her fists against Niki’s chest and howled in his face.

“Did you touch her? Did you hurt her? Did you?! Did you hurt my Polly? I will kill you, Niki, I swear to god. I will gut you!”

He grabbed her wrists and tried to hold her still but she pushed her forehead into his chest and roared – roared – a wordless, raging bellow that spewed from her chest and tore her throat ragged. Polly! That happy, sunshine girl she’d loved brutalised in a hell like that. Her own neglect of Polly’s pain. Sixteen years of loneliness – and a world between them once again.

The roar choked against futility and the years that had passed, and pitched upwards into a miserable cry.

Niki held her until her legs gave out and they both sank to the floor in a mess.

He kissed the top of her hair.

“I didn’t,” he murmured.

She sniffed. “Who?” And she sniffed again, hopelessly, when he didn’t answer. “Who?”

“They’re all dead, Toks, and I won’t honour any of them with a name. But here’s the bit you won’t find in any of those clippings – or any other news story anywhere in the world. This is Polly’s secret and you should let her tell it, but I am only alive because she spared me.”

“What?” Toks pulled back to look at him, and Niki wiped her tears away with his thumb. She was vaguely aware of the others going very still.

“By the time I got there, it had been six weeks and there was a United Nations Peacekeeping Force tightening the noose around the Dom Harmonja,” Niki said. “The male hostages were dead. The English woman – Violet – was barely alive. My father’s men let her go as a gesture of good faith to the blue berets, but they shot her in the back as she stumbled away. That left Polly, and that broken piano in the middle of the stage making a ringing noise whenever anyone spoke. They’d already killed one man with piano wire. They were pulling another length from its frame when Polly took her chance.”

Toks felt sick, but they were all hanging on Niki’s words.

“She was far braver than I was. Stronger, cleverer and more ruthless than the lot of them. Somehow, she got a rifle. When the first two Peacekeepers ran in, she and I were the only ones left. The official story is that Justin and Darren took down the remaining Securitate men and I surrendered my weapon, but the four of us swore – Justin, Darren, Polly and me, then and there on that stage – that we’d never tell what really happened. I owe Polly Paterson my life.”

Toks sat for so long with that implication echoing around her mind that she felt a teardrop track all the way to her chin. She wasn’t entirely sure what Niki wasn’t saying, but she had a fair idea.

“Polly was always better at shooting rabbits than me,” she whispered.

Nikoloz nodded, solemn and slow.

What had Polly done? What had she had to do to survive?

Magpie gave a dry chuckle. “So you do have some humility, Maestro.”

Toks had just enough strength of character left to stick her middle finger up at Magpie before she felt tears threatening again. She wiped them away and let her cousin pull her to her feet. That was enough self-pity. Now she had to be strong. Now she had half a lifetime of stubborn ignorance to atone for.

“Are we good, cuz?” Nikoloz asked. “Are you good?”

Toks nodded. Somehow the knowledge that Polly had been courageous had given her strength too. Toks knew she had so much to make up for, but she could lean on Polly’s courage. Take strength from Polly’s determination. Make amends for the silence Toks dealt her.

Because, until Toks had blithely pulled Polly back into her worst nightmares, they had almost found love again. And Toks wasn’t going to let that go.

Sumi bustled Nikoloz and Artis out a little while later.

“She has two performances to get through,” she muttered, pulling a face like she thought Toks actually being capable might be sketchy. “She needs to sort her head out.”

That was enough to prick Toks’ pride. She’d conducted far more difficult symphonies in stressful situations. She threw herself into a cold shower and revelled in its shock. She sat at the piano in her apartment with the intention of ploughing rapidly through the presto movement of the concerto as a warm-up and then getting into some serious practice, but she rested her fingers on the keys and— and nothing came out.

All she could hear were Polly’s cries as the piano on the stage of the Dom Harmonja rang with her anguish.

She began to understand the source of Polly’s madness.

An hour after that, she was standing in front of the ruined piano in the western foyer of the Dom when Sumi tugged her arm to lead her backstage.

“Are you going to be able to do this, Maestro?”

She nodded, but she wasn’t sure.

Her phone buzzed in her pocket.

Toks nearly dropped it in her haste.

Polly!

— I love you too — it said.

That was all. But it was enough.

Toks strode onto the stage for the first performance of the day and conquered it.

For Polly.

“Sumi! Where is that folder?”

Between the shows, she combed through the clippings again.

“I don’t think you should look, Toks.”

She brushed that away. Something niggled at her memory. Out of all the horrors she’d learnt over the past twenty-four hours, this one thing had slipped by her – until its impact hit her hard in the middle of the Ravel concerto in G. Crucial to any piece in G was the leading note…

The F sharp.

“Where is it… where is it?” She scattered papers across her dressing room table. “Here!” She sank into her chair. “Oh, god.”

Sumi peered over her shoulder. “That is so awful. I can’t even imagine how Polly can live with a memory like that in her head.”

The Securitate forces had murdered one of the male hostages with piano wire.

Toks thought of all those pianos at Jerinja, the agonising chord Polly had tuned into her Steinway hanging in the tree, the manner in which she’d tuned the piano at the Sydney Opera House—

She dashed back out to the western foyer, Sumi at her heels.

The ruined piano sat there. Bullet holes splintered its mahogany. Its black and white keys had been scattered by a bomb-blast. Its music was silenced.

The power of art over the ugliness of war, her arse, Toks thought. This was the piano that had driven Polly out of her mind. It wasn’t a monument.

She spared Sumi one quick glance then stepped over the red rope barricade. The iron frame of the piano was red with rust and it was obvious the damper mechanism had been destroyed long ago. A felted bar had been placed over the strings to prevent them from ringing but that had clearly been done when the piano had been restored for display. The brass pedals were unhinged, the rods that led to the dampers were impossibly twisted.

This piano would have rung like a bell when Polly had been tied to it.

Toks leant over the belly of the piano and brushed her fingertips lightly over the wires. It was brutally out of tune, but she could still piece things together.

There. The gap in the wires. The note that was missing. Toks cocked her head and analysed harmonics and overtones, and came to an awful conclusion.

The F sharp below middle C.

The sound – or rather, the absence of a sound – that had tortured Polly for sixteen years.

Toks looked up at Sumi.

“I’ve been so stupid.” Monumentally stupid.

Sumi gave her a tiny smile. “Not any more than usual,” she said, kindly.

That was fair. But Toks still clung to hope. Polly needed to heal – she understood why Justin had led her away – but Toks was the best one to help her do that.

Her phone buzzed.

— Come and find me, Toks. Please —it said.

She thought of the prophecy the fortune teller had told them both all those years ago at the fair – Polly’s passion, her ruin and her salvation.

Toks smiled.

She was all three.