The first priority to me seemed to be Birdie. It was bizarre to see her there, so small and broken, this person who had controlled our lives for so long. She was wearing the top that Clemency had made her for her birthday, and a chain that David had given her. Her long hair was twisted up in a bun. Her pale eyes stared hard at the wall. One eyeball was brilliant red. Her feet were bare and bony, her toenails overlong and slightly yellow. I unclipped the chain from around her neck and put it in my pocket.
Clemency was crying. ‘It’s so sad,’ she said. ‘It’s so sad! She’s someone’s daughter! And now she’s dead!’
‘It’s not sad at all,’ I said, harshly. ‘She deserved to die.’
Clemency and I got her on to the attic floor and then the roof. She was very light. On the other side of the flat roof where I’d once sat holding Phin’s hand, there was a sort of gulley. It was filled with dead leaves and led to the guttering that ran down the side of the building. We wrapped her in towels and sheets and rammed her in there. Then we covered her over with handfuls of dead leaves and then some pieces of old scaffolding wood that we found up there.
In the kitchen afterwards I stared dispassionately at the three dead bodies. I could not let my mind dwell on the reality of the situation. I had killed my own parents. My beautiful, stupid mother and my poor, broken father. I had to distance myself from the fact that because of me, my mother would never again run her hand through my hair and call me her beautiful boy, that I would never again sit in a members’ club with my father silently drinking lemonade. There would be no family to return to for Christmas Day, no grandparents for any children I might have, no people to worry about as they got older, no one to worry about me as I got older. I was an orphan. An orphan and an inadvertent murderer.
But I didn’t panic. I kept a check on my emotions and I looked at the three figures stretched out on the kitchen floor and I thought: They look like members of a cult. I thought: Anyone walking in here now would look at them in their matching black tunics and think they had killed themselves.
And it was obvious then what I needed to do. I needed to set the stage for a suicide pact. We arranged the party paraphernalia into something that looked a little less ‘frivolous thirtieth birthday party’ and more ‘very serious last supper’。 We got rid of the extra plates. We washed up all the pots and pans and threw away all the old food. We arranged the bodies so that they all lay in the same direction. I pressed their fingertips against the empty phials and then placed them on the table, one by each place setting as though they had taken the poisons in unison.
We didn’t speak.
It felt strangely holy.
I kissed my mother’s cheek. She was very cold.
I kissed my father’s forehead.
And then I looked at David. There he lay, the man who, just as Phin had predicted months earlier, had broken my life. The man who’d destroyed us, beaten us, denied us food and freedom, taken our passports, impregnated my mother and my sister, tried to take our house. I had snuffed out his pathetic existence and I felt triumphant. But I also felt a terrible sense of disgust.
Look at you, I wanted to say, just look at you, what an absolute loser you turned out to be.
I wanted to stamp my foot into David’s face and grind it to a bloody pulp, but I resisted the urge and made my way back up to Birdie and David’s room.
We cleared out all the boxes. In one we found a stash of Birdie’s stupid drawstring bags that she’d made to take to Camden Market and we filled them with as much stuff as we could conceivably fit in them. We found nearly seven thousand pounds in cash and divided it four ways. We also found my mother’s jewellery and my father’s gold cufflinks and platinum collar bones and a whole box full of whiskey. We poured the whiskey down the sinks and put the empty bottles with the champagne bottle by the front door. We put the jewels in our bags. Then we broke the boxes down and left them in a pile.
Once the house was clear of anything that might cast doubt upon the idea of it being a cult, we quietly left the house, by the front door, and we made our way to the river. It was early morning by now. It must have been around 3 a.m. A few cars passed by, but no one slowed or seemed to notice us. We stood by the river, at the very spot where Phin and I had tussled all those years before, where I’d ended up under water seeing apparitions in the murk. I was calm enough to appreciate my first moments of freedom in two years. After tossing the empty bottles, the silk underwear, the bottles of perfume and evening gowns into the river, in bags weighted down with stones, we stood for a moment and I could hear us all breathing, the beauty and peace of the moment briefly overshadowing the horror of it all. The air coming off the steely black surface of the river was thick with diesel and life force. It smelled of all the things we’d missed since the moment David Thomsen had walked into our house, since the day he and his family had come to live upstairs.