Never Ending (20 page)

So, they
can
make her look. And if they know when she opens and closes her eyes, they must be observing her.

There are several bug-eye lenses set into the ceiling – projecting the images that fill the room. Any one of them could house a camera to spy on her – not just to ensure she keeps her eyes open but to monitor her behaviour, her reactions. She feels like a laboratory rat.

When she has calmed a little Shiv studies the photomontage more closely, picking out details she missed at the first, shocking sight. The flat-screen TV in one corner, the books – some Greek, some English – lining the shelves, the framed print of an old woman in traditional costume hanging on the wall. She can almost picture her father at the wood-and-glass coffee table, a map spread clumsily across it as he plotted their route to the fort. Can almost see Mum’s postcards propped on the mantelpiece. Dad’s Stieg Larsson novel wedged down the side of a cushion. Dec’s stinky flip-flops and sodden swimming shorts strewn about the place and the regular trails of biscuit crumbs he left across the floor.

Can almost feel the ceiling fan losing its battle against the heat of a new day.

Can almost smell the suntan lotion she’s massaging into her skin.

Can almost hear the
thud-thud
of the tennis ball against the wall outside.

How long it is before the pictures change, she isn’t sure. But after she’s been adjusting to them, making them less upsetting, the room plunges into darkness and, an instant later, the walls and floor light up again. She’s outside, on the patio, gazing through the dangling vines at the pool, shimmering beneath a perfect Mediterranean sky. And at the olive grove and the bay and the pinkish hills, blurred by heat haze.

The pool is hard to take, with its springboard and the unbidden image that fills her head: Declan, in his red swimming shorts, performing a clownish, acrobatic leap, soaking the patio’s pink-and-white flagstones with a great plume of water. Another one: Dec, sitting cross-legged at the end of the board, shirtless, head bowed, mottled in the pool lights, the night he caught her with Nikos.

Instinctively, she shuts her eyes. The appalling buzzer snaps them back open.

For the rest of the morning – apart from a five-minute “loo break”, which Assistant Hensher escorts her to and from – Shiv is confined to her Personal Therapy Unit. Throughout this time, the projections cut back and forth between the inside and outside of the villa. Boredom should have set in; the images should have lost their power to upset her. Both of these things
do
happen, somewhere around the middle of the session. But the picture show regains its intensity – its hold over her – as the sheer monotony of sitting for so long staring at the same scenes acts like a kind of water torture.

Or it may be that, however hard she tries to resist it, Shiv’s imagination takes over – filling in the gaps, scripting the story that the pictures leave untold. Resuming the countdown of the days, hours, minutes to Declan’s death.

For the next few days, the projections remain the same.

Shiv starts to believe she can handle it. The mornings become an exercise in forcing her mind to look away, even if her eyes can’t.

Then a whole new set of images appear.

At first, Shiv can’t understand how the clinic obtained them. She has never seen them before, or even known they existed. But it dawns on her that, of course, the photos must have come from the files of the police investigation. From Dad’s lawyer out in Kyritos. Which means that Dad arranged for them to be copied to Dr Pollard.

That he has agreed to let the clinic use them.

The first is a shot of the place where Declan died. Several shots. A sequence of digitally sharp photographs from every angle, super-enlarged – a relentless slideshow that lasts the full four hours.

The next day, a different slideshow: the place where Dec’s body was found. She knows it’s the place because his body is right there in the pictures, covered in a blue tarpaulin sheet. The sequence of images stops at the one where a Greek police officer is about to pull the sheet away.

She finds Caron next door, in her bedroom. It’s lunchtime, but neither one can face eating. Shiv came up here to be by herself for a bit, before Talk, but heard sobbing as she passed Caron’s door and couldn’t just walk on by. She knocked and, after a moment, the older girl let her in.

They’re sitting at opposite ends of the bed, struggling for words. Caron looks as though she might start crying again.

“It was Mel,” she manages to say. “Just after she collapsed.”

Thinking she was fooling around, a guy at the party had carried on filming Melanie on his phone, Caron explains. The clinic must have got hold of the footage and produced stills from it. In the first few days of Phase 2, the images of Mel at the party
before
she took the pill – laughing, dancing, singing along to a song – have hit Caron hard enough. Today, she’s pale and shaky, eyes underscored by dark shadows, hair hanging limp and greasy. “How about yours?”

Shiv tells her about the latest pictures and Caron puts a hand to her mouth as though she’s about to vomit.

“How can you bear to…” But she can’t finish the sentence.

“I guess it was always going to come to this,” Shiv says.

“Come to
what
?”

“Just – death.”

Melanie and Declan, dying. For thirty days they were brought back to life; now they’re being brought back to death. But she can’t find a way to say this that wouldn’t sound brutal. She studies Caron. Where’s the sassy girl in the scarlet dress? The girl who stashed cigarettes in her knickers?

“I don’t know if I can face Talk and Write this afternoon,” Shiv says.

“No,” Caron says, after a moment. “Me neither.”

The afternoon sessions have continued as before, with the difference that each resident is required to speak – no exceptions – and to read out what they have written. They must speak and write about the death, nothing else. As Assistant Sumner puts it, they have to “sift the psychological rubble” created by the morning picture shows. Talk and Write strayed into this terrain in Phase 1, but never with such intensity.

Sumner probes, digs. Insists on details, however gory.
Where did they die, exactly? What happened, exactly? Tell me how, exactly, it was your fault
.

“Will you write me a note to say I’m sick?” Shiv asks, hoping to tease a smile from her friend. To conjure up a flash of the old Caron.

Caron lets the remark go. Talks about something else but stops at the sound of feet scuffing along the corridor. The footsteps pass Caron’s door and halt outside Shiv’s. Silence. As though the person is listening, trying to figure out if Shiv is in her room. Then, the familiar
rat-a-tat-tat
of knuckles on wood.

“Mikey,” Caron says, her voice flat.

“He’ll be wondering why I’m not at lunch.” Shiv wants to find out how he is after this morning’s PTU, but not if it means making Caron feel abandoned.

“That’s nice of him.” Toneless, again.

Shiv can all too easily imagine the shots of the river where Mikey’s sister drowned, the muddy bank where her body was dragged ashore. He has taken surprisingly well to Phase 2; the tougher line. Like, finally, the clinic gets the
point
. Call it treatment but, to Mikey, the pictures are a form of punishment. She wonders if today’s images will be enough, or how much further he needs to go before he finds the right kind of tree, the right way to bash his head against it.

She turns to Caron. “Don’t be like that.”

“I’m not being like anything.”

Rat-a-tat-tat
next door. “Shiv?” Mikey calls.

Her eyes flick towards the sound, then back to Caron. “I should—”

“Yeah,” her friend says, “you don’t want your little brother to worry.”

Shiv glares at her. “He’s
not
my brother.”

“Whatever you say, Shiv.”

The images undergo another change. Still, the slideshow of death, but gradually some living versions of Declan appear in the mix. More holiday photos, overlaying the ones of him beneath that tarpaulin, so that she can see the living brother through the outline of the dead one, or the dead brother through the living.

It doesn’t stop at photographs.

On Day 40 or 41 (she’s losing track), the moving images start to appear. She’d forgotten about the clips Mum filmed with her phone in Kyritos.

Declan, dancing in manly Greek-style with a waiter at their local taverna.

Declan, performing handstands on the beach.

Declan, doing a backflip off the springboard.

The clinic has chosen ones that show her brother at his most energetic, most vital.
Look how alive he is! How happy!
She didn’t mind the night-time picture shows in her bedroom but these moving images of the life she snuffed out are unbearable, especially right after the days of death shots.

With them comes sound. Dec talking, shouting. Laughing.

Hearing his voice shocks Shiv into the revelation she will never hear him speak again. Never hear his silly jokes, his clever riffs, his witty sarcasm, his funny accents, his stupid yodel-singing. Never hear his voice break from boy’s to man’s. Never hear him at the end of a phone, pretending to be the answering machine. Never hear him shout at her to hurry up in the bathroom. Never hear him say her name.

Of course, she hasn’t heard his voice in all the months since the night he died, except in her dreams and her imagination. But it has taken till now – taken
this
, Declan yelling, “Watch and weep, Shivoloppoulos!” as he backflips into the pool – to lay it bare for her.

She has condemned her brother to eternal silence.

13

Dec looks well. Tanned and smiley, spinning a volleyball on the tip of his middle finger. For a second, it looks as though he’s mastered it, then the ball reels off and thumps on to the sand.

“You were such a pain that day,” Shiv says. “D’you remember?”

Over and again, he tries to perfect the trick, Mum recording every attempt. You can hear her in the background, alternating between words of encouragement and bursts of laughter. They’re meant to be starting a game, two-a-side, but her brother insists on keeping them waiting while he shows off his ball-spinning skill.

“It made you so cross that you couldn’t do it.”

There he is, being cross. “I could
do
it before,” he says, on the footage.

Like it’s their fault – Shiv’s for watching, Mum’s for filming, even though he’d nagged her to. The clip ends with a freeze-frame: Dec’s face half obscured by the volleyball, the ball and his hand blurred, the forearm encrusted with sand as though afflicted by some strange skin condition.

“Then Dad took the ball off you and did a perfect spin. D’you remember?” She laughs; on the wall, he does too. “That
really
pissed you off.”

Shiv gets up, crosses the room. Touches the image. Tries to brush the sand off his arm. As she does so, the picture dissolves beneath her fingertips, mutating into a photo of her brother’s lumpy, tarpaulin-covered corpse.

Like the wall’s electrified, Shiv jerks her hand away. Almost immediately, the freeze-frame of Dec with the volleyball reappears.

“Dr Pollard reckons I have a demon inside me,” she says, after a moment, trying to steady her breathing. “Reckons I have to be exorcised.” Declan passes no comment. Shiv smiles to herself. Then, serious again, “They never
blamed
me.”

Who?
, he doesn’t ask.

“Mum and Dad. The police. Anyone, really.” She realizes she is about to touch the wall again and stops herself before the image changes. “
It’s your fault. If it wasn’t for you, he’d still be alive
– they all think it, but no one has ever said it to my face.”

Dec is quiet still.

“Do
you
think it? Do you blame me?”

Silence.

“You do. Why wouldn’t you?”

A partially obscured smile. A ball. A blurry hand. A sand-encrusted arm. A flare of irritation ignites inside her; she snuffs it out. He’s only twelve years old, after all. Dec should be angry with her, not the other way round.

“When I came here, I told Dr Pollard I had to find some way to live with what I did to you.” Her voice is breaking up. “But how can I? How
can
I live with it?”

Declan has nothing to say to her.

The next day, in PTU, there are no images at all. Just a soundtrack.

Barking dogs. For ten minutes at a time, every half an hour for four hours.

Not just any barking but a ferocious din so loud, so
savage
, the beasts might burst into the room at any moment and tear her to pieces. Shiv can’t see them, but she’s sure they’re the ones from the tree dream, waiting for her to fall from her branch.

Shiv talks about the dogs in Talk, writes about them in Write. Explains to the group about her nightmare and how the dogs fit into the events of Dec’s last night. His very last moments. It doesn’t help; if anything, she’s more traumatized by them than when she was in that room. From what the others say, and read out, the morning sessions are pushing all the residents into what Dr Pollard calls the “endgame” – forcing them to relive the last hours and minutes of their lost ones’ lives. In Kyritos, the dogs were an odd but irrelevant detail; nothing to do with Dec’s death really. Or so it had felt at the time. Now, it’s like they go to the very core of what happened. Like the dogs are outraged by Shiv, driven demented by witnessing what she did to her brother. Like they’re
judging
her.