‘Yeah. Was it because of what happened with Harris?’
Despite the warning klaxon in my gut – she was investigating me, tricking me somehow, and I shouldn’t trust her – I answered before I could stop myself. I felt like I owed her an explanation, after everything she’d done for me.
‘Partly. I just . . . I’ve always had thisanger. This violent streak that scares the hell out of me.’ For all the awful, painful flaws in the ritual, I was grateful to be sitting up here without the lingering fear that I would shove Lottie off the sill in a sudden seething fit. ‘I’m so angry. I always have been. And I don’t know why.’
‘It’s not your fault,’ she said, neither softly nor comfortingly, just matter-of-factly. She took a deep sip from the wine bottle, the smell of it apple crisp on her breath.
I shook my head. ‘But in the movies, the murderous psychopaths always have some kind of tragic backstory, an abusive childhood, an unresolved trauma . . .somethingthat made them this way. But apart from the fact my mum is ill, I don’t have any of that. My life has been good. So I think I’m just evil. Or broken. Or both. I was just born angry.’
Midges fuzzed around us and I knew we must be being bitten alive, but in the golden backlight of the room they looked almost beautiful. Pops of laughter echoed from a dorm party below. An owl hooted somewhere in the obsidian sky.
Lottie looked up at the North Tower looming above us with a kind of misty reverence. ‘Alice, we all have the violent streak. We all get angry. It’s like Raskolnikov argues inCrime
and Punishment, extraordinary men like Napoleon are allowed to act on it, simply by virtue of being extraordinary. They wage wars and build empires and are celebrated for it. But what about the rest of us? Especially women? Where doesouranger go?’
I stared at her. ‘You feel it too? The existential anger?’
‘Why do you think I thwack hockey balls around a field all day? It’s a release. And it makes me feel powerful, if only fleetingly.’
I let this ruminate for a few moments. ‘You think that’s what this is about? Wanting power?’
‘Everyone wants power, in some form. You want to be a judge, right?’
The statement snagged on my suspicion. I couldn’t remember ever telling her that. Had she built some kind of case file on me?
‘Yeah,’ I said carefully.
‘What is that aspiration about, if not power?’
I mulled this over. ‘But the violence . . . it doesn’t feel like I want power for power’s sake. It’s feral. It’sphysical.’
‘Well, when was the last time you felt physically powerless?’
Staring out into the blackening night, I remembered the moment viscerally. It coiled around in my gut like an adder through wild grass. I swallowed hard.
‘With my ex-boyfriend. I . . . I cheated on him. Emotionally, at least. I was in love with my best friend. Noémie.’ Her name still tasted ripe and heavy in my mouth. ‘And he went through my phone and found texts between us. We crossed the line, and I knew that. I tried to apologise, to say I was sorry, but when I went to kiss him, he shoved me away so hard I fell and hit my face on the coffee table.’
She looked up at me. ‘Is that where you got your scar?’
I nodded, feeling my cheeks pinken. She’d looked at my lips long enough to notice my scar. ‘So I got up, blood everywhere, and I tried to lash out back at him. I lunged with my full weight, went to smack him right in the face, and he just grabbed my wrists and held me back as though I was nothing.’
Lottie took this in for a while, turning the new knowledge over in her mind. ‘Do you think that’s why you punched Harris when he grabbed you by the wrist?’
‘Maybe. Or maybe I really am a supervillain.’
She laughed in a kind of half snort. ‘Would we say “super”?
I feel like you’re not doing a very good job.’
‘Fuck you,’ I chuckled, not meaning it in the slightest.
There were a few moments of silence between us as we drank, and I realised that it was my first true experience of peace since I’d arrived at Carvell. And it wasn’t just because of the ritual. It was because of Lottie, and how I felt when I was around her. It was her innate sunshine, the warmth and glow of it spreading to me. I liked who I was when I was around her. And for someone who’d never liked who they were – not really, beneath all the pretension and snobbery – this was significant.
For the briefest of seconds, some part of my subconscious told me to lean my head against her shoulder.
But the moment was shattered with an almighty feline screech.
Before I could even process what was happening, claws dug into my shoulder, a feral hiss in my ear.
‘What the fuck!’ yelled Lottie, dropping the wine bottle to the ground below with a smash.
I turned to face the cat, only to be met with a fiery red glow in its demonic eyes.
Salem.