Sister

“It’s easy for a doctor to cut. Not at first. The first time a doctor cuts into skin, it feels a violation. The skin, the largest human organ, covering the entire body unbroken, and you deliberately harm it. But after the first time, it no longer feels an abuse because you know that it’s to enable a surgical procedure. Cutting is no longer violent or violating but the necessary step to healing.”

Mr. Wright tightens his warm fingers around mine. My legs are turning numb now.

I could hear my heart beating fast and hard against the concrete, the only part of my body that was alert as I looked at him. And then, astonishingly, I saw him put the knife into the inside pocket of his jacket.

Optimism heated my numbed body.

He helped me sit up.

He told me that he wasn’t going to cut me because an overdose is less suspicious than a knife.

I can’t use his actual words. I just can’t.

He said he had already given me enough sedative in the tea to make it impossible for me to struggle or escape. And that now he was going to give me a fatal dose. He assured me that it would be peaceful and painless, and it was the false kindness of his words that made them so unbearable, because it was himself he was comforting.

He said he’d brought his own sedatives but didn’t need to use them.

He took a bottle out of his pocket, the sleeping pills Todd had brought with him from the States, prescribed for me by my doctor. He must have found them in the bathroom cupboard. Like the bicycle chain and the flashlight and the knife, the bottle of sleeping pills showed his detailed planning, and I understood why premeditated murder is so much worse than spontaneous killing; he had been evil for far longer than the time it would actually take to kill me.

The dusk has brought the chill of darkness. They’re shutting the gates now, the last of the teenagers are packing up to go. The children will already be at home for baths and bedtime, but Mr. Wright and I remain, not finished yet. For some reason, they haven’t made us leave. Maybe they didn’t notice us here. And I’m grateful because I need to keep going. I need to reach the end.

My legs have lost all feeling and I’m worried that Mr. Wright will have to carry me, fireman style, out of the park. Or maybe he will get an ambulance to drive all the way in.

But I will finish this first.

I pleaded with him. Did you do that too? I think that you did. I think that like me you were desperate to stay alive. But of course it didn’t work; it just irritated him. As he twisted the cap off the bottle of sleeping pills, I summoned the residue of my physical energy and tried logical argument.

“If I’m found here, in the same place as Tess, it’s bound to make the police suspicious. And it’ll make them question Tess’s death too. It’s madness to do it here—isn’t it?”

For a moment the irritation left his face and he stopped twisting the cap, and I’d won a reprieve in this perverted debate.

Then he smiled, as if reassuring me as much as himself that I needn’t have such worries. “I did think about that. But the police know how you’ve been since Tess died; they already see you as a little unhinged, don’t they? And even if they don’t get it themselves, any psychiatrist will tell them that you chose this place to kill yourself. You wanted to kill yourself where your little sister had died.”

He took the cap off the bottle of sleeping pills.

“After all, if we’re being logical, who in their right mind would choose to end the life of two people in the same building?”

End the life. He was turning brutal killing into something passive, as if it was assisted euthanasia and not murder.

As he poured the pills into his cupped hand, I wondered who would question my suicide or vouch for my sane state of my mind. Dr. Nichols, at whom I had furiously sung the lullaby? Even if he thought I wasn’t suicidal at our last meeting, he would probably doubt that diagnosis, as he did with you, and blame himself for not seeing the signs. And DI Haines? He already thought I was overly emotional and irrational, and I doubted DS Finborough, even if he wanted to try, could convince him otherwise. Todd thought I was “unable to accept the facts,” and many others agreed, even if they were too kind to say so to my face. They’d think that in emotional turmoil after your death, irrational and depressed, I could easily have become suicidal. The sensible, conventional person I’d been a few months ago would never have been found dead from an overdose in this place. They would have asked questions for her but not for the person I had become.