“Gilly?”
The rain has begun again, adding to the noise. She peers down at him, now on her hands and knees.
“Help me, Gilly.”
But the futility of this request is obvious. He is beyond her reach.
“I’ll have to get help.”
“It hurts when I breathe. And my leg... I think it’s broken.”
“Don’t worry... I’ll run and get someone.”
But this only induces panic in him. “No! No! Don’t leave me, Gilly.”
“I’ve got to, Greg...”
“What if the wheel turns again? It’ll pull me under.”
“But I can’t do anything on my own...”
It is then that the mobile phone rings. At once she thinks, “Of course! I’ll phone for help.” At the same time she wonders who is calling him, who called him not five minutes before.
She looks at the screen.
Nikki.
She does not know anyone called “Nikki”: she does not know that Greg knows anyone called “Nikki”.
It is a curiously intimate name, full of suggestion.
She knows then that it is the name of his lover.
She presses the red button, the one that cuts off the connection, sees a movement out of the corner of her eye, and looks around to see a small girl standing just behind her. She jumps in shock.
Greg sees Gilly’s head disappear from his view above.
“Gilly?”
The child has Down’s Syndrome — severely so. She does not speak, does not even react beyond a smile on her face that is part beatific, part eerie; the look in her eyes is unfocused, as if she does not see Gilly but far beyond her.
Gilly tries a smile; a friendly one, a gentle one. “Hello. What’s your name?”
No reaction; neither response nor movement.
Greg’s voice comes from below a second time, this time more urgent, more panicked and almost angry.
Gilly turns back to him and calls down, “It’s all right, Greg. There’s...”
But as she turns back to the girl, she sees nothing there. There is no child, no sign that there ever was.
“What is it?” Greg is demanding, like a child himself.
Gilly has stood up, is looking all around her — through the windows of the mill, over on the other side of the fast-flowing stream. Nothing.
“Gilly, for God’s sake...”
At last she turns back to him but she is still confused, wondering.
He calls, “Will you get me out of here?”
She remembers the phone, bends to pick it up, but this time her head is filled with thoughts beyond Greg’s predicament.
Would my child have looked like that?
I was going to call her Belle...
She wasn’t ugly, not ugly at all...
I could have loved her...
Gilly has suppressed from her memory the fact that she was sexually assaulted as a seven-year-old girl by an uncle, a brother of her now dead mother. She has suppressed this but it lurks there, not dead, not even dormant, just stealthy.
It has poisoned her, turned her.
She believes that she is still essentially innocent.
But she is not.
Virginity, both sexual and moral, went long ago, stolen from her, and the only thing between Gilly and depravity is the construct she has made of her life, the one that she has built on a foundation of a lie.
Gilly does not carry a mobile phone, does not want the leash that it represents.
She called him.
Now, this week of all weeks, she called him. Couldn’t she let me have him to myself for just a week?
She looks at the phone. She is familiar enough with it to work her way through the menus.
She hears Greg call again. “Gilly? What’s happening?”
Without looking down at him she replies, “I’m phoning, Greg.”
She comes across the call log, is about to call back the last number received (although she does not know why), but then she hears, quite distinctly, a child’s voice in her head; although she never heard the little girl speak, it carries with it certainty that it is hers. Nor does it come in words, only knowledge.
Gilly opts to look at the messages received.
The rain is falling hard now. The stream is rushing and there is a single but deeply menacing creak as the plank of wood that juts through the hole moves slightly.
“Gilly?”
Some are from her, some are from strangers, but most are from “Nikki”.
The ones from Nikki are graphic, sexual, illuminating. As Gilly reads them, moving backwards in time through the past few days, then weeks, she comes to appreciate just how little she has known about Greg’s life, about his thoughts, about his wishes for the future. She sees that Greg has gone elsewhere not just to complement something in his life that she is not supplying, that he has gone there for a completely different experience.
She is stunned.
The man with whom she has shared her pleasures and pains has been an actor. There is a facet to him that he has hidden from her, one that, now exposed, casts him as a liar, as contemptuous of her gullibility, as mocking of her sexual timidity.
This epiphany is a light in her head, but one that burns as bright as laser-light, one that destroys as it enlightens. It cracks the entire edifice of her life, the beliefs that she has been in the possession of “truth”. It allows the evil that she went through as a child, that has adulterated her, to rise up and embrace her completely. It floods into the cracks in her mind and splinters it, making razor sharp shards with which to wound.
It spreads through her and throws shadows in places that once were lit, lights crevices and thereby allows her to see the monsters that lurk within.
She reassesses his actions and words of the past weeks and months, but there is worse to come...
“Where are you, Gilly?”
Gilly’s head appears in the hole above him. “Here I am, dear.”
“What’s happening?”
She smiles. He is very, very cold; this helps the pain but dulls his thoughts. He can see that her attitude is somehow wrong, but he cannot bring his sluggish thoughts to wonder why. She says, “I’m sorting things out.”
“Hurry up... please.”
“It won’t be long.”
Another creak from the wheel.
He said, “We could live here.”
He wasn’t talking to me, but to himself.
Was he also talking to his girlfriend...?
And the money...
How far have your plans gone, Greg? How close are you to leaving me?
Gilly is starting to feel strange. Her head is filling with all sorts of ideas and possibilities that have sprung into febrile activity, that scurry from corner to corner, feeding on all that has been done to her. She makes a last effort to control them, to counter the dizzying revolution in her mind.
She glances back at the phone, sees for the first time a time and date.
It is from Nikki and it is full of anticipation, apparently agreeing to meet him that afternoon.
It is dated the 6th of June and it was sent at five minutes to two in the afternoon.
It would all have been different if we could have had children. Perhaps that is what the problem was, the reason for his infidelity; I have not been able to give him children, could only promise him a handicapped baby...
This attempt is futile; worse it is the fuel that causes the smouldering to erupt into conflagration.