Page 21

21

Marina

The collars were canvas OR leather, and they fastened with buckles or plastic clips, and you could probably remove them easily enough. Weren’t there collars that had little padlocks on them? That could attach to a chain, also with a padlock maybe, and then attach to a bedpost, or...

Did Nana Sylvia keep her third husband captive in the bomb shelter until he died?

Or did she shoot him?

Or both?

The idea wasn’t as shocking to Marina as it could have been. Her grandmother had never lived by the rules, and while she’d never imagined that Nana Sylvia’s eccentricities would extend to murder...it was a long time ago, and maybe Barry deserved it.

This was the wrong way to think. Murder was evil, and never justified.

And yet she herself had just pushed her new boyfriend down the stairs seemingly on a whim.

“What sort of dog do you have?”

Marina jumped and came back to the present. She was in a pet shop, full of cat litter and dog treats and the bubbling of multiple aquariums. A young, friendly-looking person stood beside her, wearing a T-shirt bearing the name of the shop.

“Oh,” said Marina. “I don’t have a dog.”

“Oh, that’s okay,” said the person. “I thought, since you’d been standing here for so long...Anyway, that’s cool. Some people are just fans of collars?”

“Um.”

“It’s fine. I don’t judge.”

Right. Right. She’d been thinking about restraining the man in her basement, and this shop assistant now thought she was a housewife wanting to try a little tame BDSM. “I’d go to a sex shop for that sort of thing,” Marina said.

“Well, these are probably sturdier, and pretty adjustable.” The assistant pointed to a black leather collar with silver studs. “I mean if that can stand up to a Rottweiler, it’s going to stand up to anything. Were you looking for anything in particular?”

“Actually, I was—I got distracted. I wonder if you can tell me, what is the noisiest pet in your shop?”

The assistant frowned, thinking. “We don’t have actual dogs here. I’d contact a breeder, or a rescue center.”

“Oh. I’m not ready for a dog. But do you have a parrot, maybe? A talking one?”

The possibility of a talking parrot was what had brought her to this pet shop. Or a cockatoo, or a macaw. Anything, really, that made enough noise to cover up thumps and yells from a basement.

Of course, she’d only need to cover up thumps and yells if she kept Xavier in the basement for much longer. Which she wasn’t going to do.

Right?

“Is it specifically a bird you’re looking for, or is it more the noise you’re interested in?”

“It’s the noise. My neighbors are doing a lot of construction work.” Not technically a lie.

“I might know just the one.”

She followed the assistant across the shop to a wall of cages, all containing small rodents. Little white mice, scratching the glass with little pink feet. Gerbils sleeping in fluffy clumps. A rat digging in a pile of sawdust. Guinea pigs squealed in a pen on the floor. And there was a rattle, a rattle, a rattle, a rattle, a thump. A rattle, a rattle, a rattle, a thump.

“What’s that?” asked Marina.

“That,” said the assistant, pointing to a cage, “is this hamster right here.”

The hamster was tan and white, excessively fluffy, or maybe it was fat. It had a pink nose and shiny black eyes. As Marina watched, it hauled itself into its hamster wheel and ran frantically for several seconds, hard enough to rattle the wheel and the cage with its efforts. Then, abruptly, it stopped, and the momentum of the wheel made the hamster keep going, up to the apex of the spin, where gravity took over and the rodent fell, with a thump, onto the sawdust-cushioned bottom of its cage.

Then got up, shook itself, and started all over again.

“His name is Godzilla,” said the assistant. “He’s lovely. Very friendly. But daft as a brush. When he’s not doing the wheel thing, he’s gnawing on something or banging his water bottle. I have personally sold him three times. He keeps coming back.”

“Godzilla,” repeated Marina. “Is he okay with children?”

“Oh yeah. In fact, the only time you can really stop him from being such a brute is when you cuddle him. He loves that. But otherwise, he’s a small fluffy noise nuisance.” The assistant looked at the hamster fondly. “I’d have him myself, but I live in a flat with thin walls.”

Marina thought of Archie and Lucy Rose’s faces lighting up when they found they had a pet. She thought of all the comforting hamsternoise that would be in her kitchen. She couldn’t afford a pet...but she had an emergency credit card, and this definitely qualified as an emergency.

“I’ll take him,” she said.

* * *

When she stepped out of the shop, laden with cage, food, bedding, water bottle, food dish, wheel, ball, Godzilla, and additional debt, the first person she saw was Nancy. Nancy, who had been leader of her local new moms’ group when their first children were infants. Nancy who was now head of the PTA group. Nancy who had perfect children, a husband who loved her, a side business selling handmade crafts, who had posted that #GirlsNightOut pictures of mojitos, and happened to be walking by with little Jocasta in a Bugaboo at the exact same time that Marina emerged from the shop.

Nancy’s eyes widened. “Marina!” she exclaimed. Marina could not tell if it was in surprise, delight, disapproval, or contempt.

Marina was not going to answer any questions about her new life today.

“Oh hi,” she said. “I’ve got to go pick up the kids from my mom’s. Catch up soon?”

“Definitely!” said Nancy.

Marina was already turning in the opposite direction. “Can’t wait!”

Who knew it was easier to lie than to apologize?

* * *

“I’m going for a run,” said Opal, meeting Marina at the door and barely glancing at the massive amounts of hamster-related stuff she was carrying. “I’ll be back in a few hours. Last time I checked, he was asleep.”

How quickly Xavier had become merely “he”—a person who was so powerful in their combined lives that he only needed a single pronoun for identification.

Marina and Jake used to talk about Archie like this when he was a newborn. He’s hungry. He needs changing. He slept through the night. They revolved around their baby as if he were a tiny, vulnerable god.

Marina went downstairs and checked. Xavier was lying on his back on the cot, snoring lightly. The skeleton had been dumped onto the floor. The Nutella and Gummi Bear sandwich was also lying on the floor, as if he’d thrown it. Another piece of evidence that grown men were basically toddlers.

Back in the kitchen, she had set up Godzilla’s cage and was performing the therapeutic task of forcing boiled potatoes through a ricer to make them completely smooth, when the doorbell went. She could barely hear it above the rattle-rattle-rattle-thump.

The shiny-faced man on her doorstop was Mr. Anderson. He didn’t even wait for her to say hello before he yelled, “What’s this then about you throwing rubbish into our garden?”

“Pardon?”

“You people never stop complaining. I’ll have you know that we have a permit from the council. I used to be a councilor myself so I know my rights, and you can stop being a busybody, Karen!”

“My name’s Marina. I introduced myself a few weeks ago and tried to give you chocolate mousse.”

“It doesn’t matter what your name is, I know your type, whining and whining and thinking you can have everything your way and if you don’t, you resort to using my property as some sort of trash can!”

He shoved a plastic Waitrose bag at her. Mystified, Marina looked inside. It contained a variety of biscuit wrappers, mostly Oreos, and three empty and crushed cans of Monster energy drink.

“This isn’t mine.”

“This isn’t mine,” mimicked Mr. Anderson in a falsetto. “Fake news, Karen, fake news! If it isn’t yours, how did it get into my garden over the fence from your house? Did UFOs drop it from space?”

“What part of your garden?”

“Over by that tree of yours. Which you are going to have to cut back, by the way. It’s going to drop leaves on our new conservatory roof. You’ll be hearing from the council. And if you don’t stop using my garden as a dumpster, you’ll be hearing from the police too!”

“I really didn’t throw this in your garden,” said Marina, telling the truth for maybe the first time today, but he had already fumed off. She watched him stump down her front path and through the gate. So much high blood pressure, over a little trash.

She wondered if he would talk with her differently if he knew she had pushed a man down the stairs and imprisoned him in her basement.

She thought that maybe he would be afraid of her.

That should make her feel terrible, but actually, it made her feel powerful.

She brought the bag of rubbish round the side of the house to the trash cans and separated out the recyclables. Then she investigated the garden. The tree that Mr. Anderson was talking about was a horse chestnut, an elderly giant with obligingly low limbs. Many years ago, Nana Sylvia had paid a man to build a ladder against its trunk and a platform in its branches. She and her brother used to climb it in the summers and use the platform as a clubhouse until their parents caught them and told Marina that girls don’t climb trees.

Marina gazed up at its lush foliage and sturdy limbs. It had a trunk like an elephant’s leg. From up in its branches, you could see all over the neighborhood and a wide glittering swathe of the Thames. One day, Archie would climb it, and so would Lucy Rose, and so would Ewan, and she would cheer them on.

She wasn’t going to trim it. Fuck the Andersons.

Something crunched under her foot. Looking down, she identified it immediately: the partly crushed remains of half an Oreo.

She tested the ladder. It was solid enough, so she climbed up and up, through the branches until she reached the platform and stood up on it. It was empty. Searching, she saw something that might be biscuit crumbs, but she couldn’t be certain.

What she did notice, however, was something she’d never cared about when she was up on this platform as a child, when she was much more interested in the river and the other houses around her. From up here, if you stood in the middle of the platform and slightly to the right and faced the house where she now lived, you could see straight into the back windows. Including the kitchen, and her bedroom.