Page 7 of Hex House
Owen swayed a little, looking past her. “You’re sure? You’ll be alright? I can come with you the rest of the way.”
She shook her head but did let him take her number, watching his clumsy fingers as he keyed in her name, the way he had to concentrate hard through his semi-drunken haze. Then she strode away from him down Leith Walk, knowing she’d have to retrace her steps once she was confident he’d gone. When she turned around, he was watching her walk away. He raised a single hand in a wave she didn’t return.
Now, she crosses North Bridge, stumbling only slightly. The sky is cobalt, blistered with stars straining through the city smog. Trains departing Waverley roar beneath her feet and the gothic tenements of the Mile rise up to her right, their windows like a thousand eyes peering from their stone sockets. Edinburgh Castle looms above it all, quiet and dark. Sometimes she wonders how it’s possible to stay sane with a city like this looking back at you, never letting you out of its sight. She wonders if she ever felt thisway before Hex House, like everything was a barely veiled threat, like there were ghosts living inside her – tangled in her hair, wrapped around each sinew – teeming at her edges to get out.
She lives in a tiny one-bedroom in a tall, narrow building off the Mile. The arched entrance and cobbled court yard give it a faded sense of elegance, but the light in the stairwell hasn’t worked in months and it perpetually smells of piss, of stale smoke. Edinburgh is a grand old dame, but she’s got rotted teeth and her bones are fit to snap.
Her flat is at the very top of the building, stuffed into a misshapen corner. It’s all awkward angles that won’t fit any furniture and windows that barely open, but it’s what she can afford. Siobhan turns the lights on in the order she prefers – overhead living room light, lonely kitchen bulb, then the bedside lamp. The flat simmers in the gloom. She has the sense, as she often does, that someone has been here while she was out, wearing her dirty clothes and wiping their tongue around the top of the milk. She wonders what Owen would have made of all this had she brought him back here: the one sofa sagging under unwashed laundry, the empty bottles lined up on the windowsill and around the bin like trophies. Maybe he wouldn’t have cared, and they’d be in the bedroom already. In the bedroom, where there is a small desk with a drawer that locks. In that drawer is a laptop, and on that laptop is a folder called ‘Hex House’. Siobhan is always aware of that folder, as if it’s a siren, singing softly to her, but she won’t give into it. Not tonight.
Instead, she pours herself a measure of tequila and drinks it quickly. She wrestles her dark, coarse hair into a bun on the top of her head. While she’s changing forbed, she pauses to check, as she always does, the scar that sits between her belly button and pubic bone. It’s a furious red-pink against her olive skin, even all these years later. She drags one fingernail over the shape of it, across its ridges and furrows, just deep enough to hurt.
She’s falling asleep when it starts to rain. The rain is always loud up here, the building’s pointed roof just a few metres above her head. It’s soft at first, a pitter-patter that soaks the tiles. In the early hours it turns thunderous, raindrops the size of pellets hammering the roof like they’re trying to get into her skin, to make their way inside her. In the space between wakefulness and dreams, Siobhan imagines they’re the bodies of birds. One by one, they fall dead and heavy from the sky, skeletons smashing against the houses.
THEN
Elly is watching a woman rolling a plum between her palms, its waxy skin the colour of a bruise. The woman has one fox-like eye, and the other is scarred shut, the skin flat where a bulge should be. She holds still for a moment, and then squeezes the plum in one hand until there’s a wet sound. Juice leaks out from between her fingers. She smiles and Elly feels as though an egg has cracked in the pit of her stomach.
“That’s what it was like, when it popped.” A quick tongue darts out from between the woman’s neat teeth and she catches a drip of amber juice before it hits the table. “I think about itallthe time.”
The woman is called Margot, and she has soot-coloured curls and skin so pale you can see the veins right through. She has a northern accent and talks quickly and loudly, as if time is always running out. Sometimes, the words collapse into each other and Elly struggles tounderstand her, but by the time she asks Margot to repeat herself, she’s already moved on.
They sit with around thirty other women at a very long oak table, eating breakfast. They take all their meals in the narrow room the guests call the refectory, which juts out from the back of the house and runs the length of the garden. It’s made almost entirely of glass and is crowded with tall, fern-like plants that brush against their faces while they eat and make the whole room smell like damp earth. This morning, the sun suffuses the glass and casts the women’s faces in buttery light. It makes their keen eyes glitter, picks out the purple of their bruises and the white of the bandages around their arms. Those bandages – Elly can’t stop looking at them. Why do so many of the women have wounds? The women themselves seem unfazed by their injuries, reaching across the table to pass spoons and plates, stretching and yawning, leaning against one another lazily. There is an easiness to their touch, Elly has noticed, as if they are all very familiar with each other’s bodies.
The table is covered with sticky spoons left in pots of preserve, jugs of milk growing warm and starting to spoil. A cornucopia appears on the table each morning: tart green apples vivisected and sprinkled with sugar, freshly baked loaves of bread studded with seeds, stoneware bowls full of steaming porridge. The women also eat a surprising amount of meat – so muchmeat– at every meal. They tear into tender strips of steak, they chew on kidneys stewed with mushrooms, they peel the fat from bacon with their fingers.
Hex House is a myth, Elly tells herself, multiple times a day.It is a hole on the map where no one has ever been. Hex House isn’t real.
And yet, here she is.
The minutes pass, and then the hours, and here she is still.
Elly looks down at the pulpy mess in Margot’s hand and tries to remember it’s a plum. “I almost feel sorry for you,” Margot tells her dreamily, “that you’ve never felt it before.”
Elly lets herself imagine it: the wet pluck of an eyeball from a socket. It makes bile creep up the back of her throat. She shudders.
“You’re easily scared,” Margot is saying, nodding, matter-of-fact. “Like a little mouse.”
“My angel.” A deep voice from behind them, smooth as coffee shot through with honey.
Haina.
Haina, with her dark eyes and steady stare. Her hands are in Margot’s curls, brushing them gently back from her face. “Shall we let Elly eat her breakfast in peace?”
“Sorry, Haina.” Margot raises her hand to her mouth and starts to lick her sticky fingers. She looks like a cat, finally fed. The juice drips onto her faded Coca-Cola T-shirt.
Elly feels Haina’s palms land on her own shoulders. Their warmth is palpable, even through her T-shirt. When she looks up, Haina is smiling down at her. “Have you been made to feel welcome, Elly?”
Elly nods. It’s the truth. The other women have welcomed her like a lost sister since she arrived two days ago. Margot showed her the bed in the dormitory where she’d sleep, gleeful that it was the one beside her own. Janine, with her shorn head covered with silvery scars, brought her some spare T-shirts, which Elly gratefully accepted though they smelled of sweat and dirt. Lakshmishowed her where the bathrooms were and then asked if Elly wanted to borrow her lipstick, a dark damson shade almost worn down to the nub. Isla and Iona – the red sisters, the other guests call them, on account of their fiery hair – immediately wanted to talk about the baby, looking at her stomach with darting, quicksilver eyes. Their plaits are braided so close to their scalps that they pull the papery skin at the temples taut, giving them permanently startled expressions. Each day, they ask if they can touch her belly. They squeal and clutch each other when the baby kicks.
Haina is still watching Elly. Her eyes are the colour of carob, two shining beetles embedded deep in her skin, which has a Middle Eastern warmth. Her lips are full, bud-like, her nose long and sharp at the tip. Elly has watched the way Haina glides through rooms, elegant as a ballerina but with more ferocity than flourish, beautiful in the same way that a blade is beautiful. There is something uncompromising about her, something urgent, though her composure is as calm as a still pool. Two days and forever ago, when Elly had found the house – or when the house had found her – she’d seen Haina standing in the doorway and been struck by a thought that hasn’t left her since: that she should never give this woman any reason to be disappointed in her. That night, when Elly had arrived with a dirty, tear-streaked face, her bones so heavy she could barely stand, Haina had led her into a circular room with stained-glass windows and old books lining the walls. She wrapped Elly in a blanket, sat her in an armchair by the fire and pressed tea into her numb hands.Run, part of Elly’s brain had screamed.Run, now. But she’d done enough running, and the room was so warm, so comforting, thewoman in front of her wearing an expression so welcoming and concerned that it had all come spilling out: Ethan, the wedding, the baby, the blood on the cottage wall, all of it. As she spoke, Haina held Elly’s hands in hers, pulled her close. She stroked Elly’s hair and cooed in her ear,You’re safe here, my angel, he will never find you, and Elly had felt as though she were melting, as if her body had finally been given permission to surrender.
The sun was coming up when Elly said, “I just don’t understand how I’m here.”
“You’re here because you needed us. The house – the house always knows.”
“We’ll have our first session today, Elly,” Haina says now. “After lunch. If you feel ready for it.”
Elly nods, biting the inside of her cheek. She’s heard about the sessions from the other women: an hour of one-on-one time with Haina, every week. The guests talk about the sessions in revered tones and with a strange, dreamy look in their eyes, though no one has actually told her what she should expect to happen.We’re very lucky that we have Haina to teach us, is all Margot will tell her. Elly has been half-hoping and half-dreading the invite would never come.
