“We can share it.” She heard the screw of the hipflask, and then the tinny slosh of its contents. When Robbo got up to walk around the fire, she could hear his boots sinking into the snow, and the creak-like sound of them shifting inside it before lifting free. The snow had got deep fast. When he squatted down next to her, she could instantly smell the rum, his breath, his sweat. Goosebumps prickled her skin. Perhaps her other senses were getting better after all.
“You okay, ’annah?”
“Yeah,” she said, feeling the cool smoothness of the hip flask against her open palms, putting her numb fingers around its opening before guiding it to her lips. She coughed as soon as she swallowed, and then put it to her lips again before pausing.
“It’s okay, you finish it,” Robbo said.
When he started getting up, she reached out for him, tugging on his coat. And when he squatted back down, she released a breath that she hadn’t realized she’d been holding. She didn’t take another drink, but she swallowed anyway.
“I can see them, Robbo. The Whites. I’ve always been able to see them. Right from the start.”
He lost his balance. She heard his legs going out from under him, boot heels scraping against buried dirt, his arse hitting the snow with a nearly funny whump.
“They’re all I can see.” She felt a need to explain that was pretty much redundant now—but the omission had been too heavy. All those weeks of people trusting her, holding her elbow, thinking she was benignly special, their good luck charm. She’d helped them, but not enough. Not in the ways that she could have. And now there was this.
“That’s boss, ’annah.” But his voice was careful, guarded. Maybe even a little disappointed in her. “And I can understand like, why you never let on. You’d be the same as them folk who didn’t go blind in that Triffid thing, ay? Every cunt’d want a piece of you.”
She tried to smile when he immediately cursed—when he realized what he’d said and tried to take it back. It made her like him more. It made the choppy beating of her heart choppier.
“You’re right, Robbo. You’re right, it’s the same.” But it wasn’t. She hadn’t kept quiet about being able to see those fast and silent white horrors, like nets of bloated muslin twisted by the wind, because she’d been afraid of being exploited. She’d done it because she’d wanted to feel wanted, needed to be needed. Just like all of those yellow days spent hunched over her laptop in the grimy, freezing kitchenette of her bedsit. She’d needed to feel powerful.
She took another swallow of rum and it went down better than the first. This time she didn’t cough. When she shook the flask, it gave a tinny, almost empty slosh. “You finish it,” she said, pushing it against his coat.
“Why d’you make us stop here tonight, ’annah?”
She could hear the quiet neutrality in his voice, the cleverer, fearful certainty. She pictured those fiery dun beacons again.
“Do you know what I think, Robbo?” she said, feeling self-consciously histrionic despite herself, despite the circumstances. “I think the world would be better off without us. I think the land and the sea and everything living in both would be better off without us. And I think that God—if there is one—would be better off without us too.” She stopped, wiped tears as well as fat flakes of snow from under her eyes before turning back towards Robbo, the heat and sweat and fearful certainty of him. “But I need to know what you think, Robbo. I need you to tell me what you think.”
He shifted, got back onto his haunches. When he spoke, she could hear the smile in his words as well as all that fear. “I think we’d be the ones better off without fuckin’ God, ’annah.” He immediately tutted, as if his answer had annoyed him, and then sighed a long, low sigh. “I reckon love’s just another excuse for hate.”
“Good,” she said. Her own breath left her in a shuddery exhale that she imagined as a silvery plume of smoke. “Me too.”
The world will be white and quiet, she thought. Nothing but white and quiet.
“Aren’t you going to finish the rum?” she said instead, and her teeth were suddenly chattering too much; she bit her tongue.
“It’s okay, ’annah,” Robbo said, taking hold of both of her hands and pulling them into the warmth of his chest. She could feel his frantic heartbeat against her knuckles.
She thought of his mate being led out to the police car, still wet from his shower, looking back at Robbo in his skivvies and slippers. She squeezed closed her eyes. The world will be white and quiet, she thought, the world will be white and quiet, like a mantra that she’d once believed in but now no longer trusted at all.
“I’m sorry,” she whispered.
She kept hold of Robbo’s hands as she lifted up her head, as she opened her eyes. She gripped them harder as she let herself see all those bloated fists of white wind around them. All those casually cruel eyes, hungry dark mouths. The hundreds—maybe now even thousands—of them crouched inside the expectant silent hush. They weren’t waiting for her; they weren’t waiting for anything. They were simply taking their pleasure, stretching it as far as they could.
She remembered how it had felt to know that she had someone caught and trapped by her smiling lies; how the anticipation of destroying all she had built up had so often loomed larger than the final act itself. And how that need to purge—to pass along all her fear and furious loneliness, like a contagion of fire along headland and cliff—had never waned, never ever lost its power. She was sorry for it now—sorry for all of it—but she’d never lied to herself. She’d never pretended that if the Whites hadn’t come she would ever have stopped.
The world will be white and quiet.
“It’s okay, ’annah,” Robbo said again, pressing the wet prickle of his face against her own as those eyes, those mouths, all that eager, twisted white rushed over the camp in a suffocating fog that would soon not be quiet at all. “It’s okay.”
And she believed him, she trusted him, she clung onto him. Even though he was blind.
Secret Keeper
Bonnie Jo Stufflebeam
You know how this story goes: the girl was kissed in the womb by the devil. When she emerged into the too-bright world, she was missing half her face where his teeth tore it off. The doctors did their best; they grafted skin over the left side, added collagen in her cheeks. “Smile,” they said, tickling her feet. But she could not smile, and so no one smiled at her.
A girl is supposed to be beautiful. A girl is supposed to have rosy red cheeks and a laugh that makes men wilt to think of her bright future. A beautiful girl will have a beautiful life. An ugly girl slips unseen through secret doors.
The girl was always good at finding secrets. She was better at keeping them.
An ugly girl does what she can to get by. She is thrown into the world of zits and water bras and miniskirts, but none of that matters when she wears a face like flattened roadkill. When she is caught staring at the other faces in the locker rooms—eager to linger long on that which she doesn’t have—her interest is misnamed in a world obsessed with naming things. But this girl already has many names: Erica, at first, then ghost, a name given her for the ghastly pallor of her grafted skin.
A ghost girl cries for her first year of middle school, listening to an old Patti Smith song—“Pissing in a River”—and hoping someone might wrap their arms around her and carry her to a home where she is wanted, where there are hundreds of ghost girls like her. When she realizes that no one is coming, she stares into the mirror so long her face distorts into a thing of beauty. She is changed. She tears her eyes away. She must change.