She finds tea towels and puts them into his hands. ‘Hold them tight,’ she says, breathlessly, ‘hold them against it.’

He takes the cloths and presses them to his side and then she sees his legs buckle and he’s falling to the floor. She tries to help him up again but he bats her away. It suddenly occurs to Lucy that Michael is dying. She envisages herself making a phone call to the emergency services. She imagines them arriving here, asking her what happened. She would tell them that he raped her. There would be evidence. The broken glass still embedded in her back would be proof. The fact that he still has his trousers around his ankles. Yes, they would believe her. They would.

‘I’m calling an ambulance,’ she says to Michael whose eyes are staring blindly into nothingness. ‘Just keep breathing. Keep breathing. I’m calling them.’

She pulls her phone from her bag with shaking fingers, switches it on and is about to press the first digit when she realises this: she may well be believed, but she will not be released. She will have to stay in France, answer questions; she will have to reveal that she is here illegally, that she does not exist, and her children will be taken away from her and everything, absolutely everything will unravel, horribly, quickly, nightmarishly.

Her finger still rests on the screen of her phone. She glances down at Michael. He is trembling. Blood still flows from his side. She feels sick and turns to face the sink, breathing hard.

‘Oh God oh God oh God. Oh God oh God oh God.’

She turns back, looks at her phone, looks at Michael. She does not know what to do. And then she sees it; she sees the life pass from Michael’s body. She has seen it before. She knows what it looks like. Michael is dead.

‘Oh God. Oh God, oh God.’ She drops to her haunches and feels for his pulse. There is nothing.

She begins to talk to herself.

‘OK,’ she says, standing up. ‘OK. Now. Who knows you were here? Joy, he might have told Joy. But he would have told her that Lucy Smith was coming. Yes. Lucy Smith. But that is not my real name and now I am not even Lucy Smith. I am …’ Her shaking hands find the little felt bag and she pulls out the passports. She flicks to the back and reads the text. ‘I am Marie Valerie Caron. Good. Good. I am Marie Caron. Yes. And Lucy Smith does not exist. Joy does not know where I live. But …

‘School!’ she says. ‘Michael knew where Marco went to school. But would he have told Joy? No. he would not have told Joy. Of course not. And even if he did, they only know Lucy Smith, not Marie Caron. And Stella is at a different school to Marco and no one apart from me and Samia knows where that is. So, what about the passport people? No. They would be somewhere so deeply buried away in the criminal underworld that no one would even think to look. The children: they knew I was here, but they would not tell anyone. Good. OK.’

She paces as she speaks. Then she looks down at Michael’s body. Should she leave it? Leave it for Joy to find tomorrow morning. Or should she move him, clean everything? Hide his body? He is a big man. Where would she hide him? She would not be able to hide him completely, but maybe for just long enough for her and the children to get to London.

Yes, she decides, yes. She will clean everything. She will pull his body down into his wine cellar. She will cover it up with something. Joy will come tomorrow and think he has gone somewhere. She won’t know he’s missing until his body starts to smell. By which time Lucy and the children will be long gone. And everyone will just assume he was killed by someone from the shadier parts of his life.

She pulls open the cupboard beneath the sink. She takes out bleach. She opens a new roll of super-absorbent kitchen towel.

She starts to clean.

29

CHELSEA, 1990

Phin and I sat on the roof of the house. Phin had found the roof. I had no idea it existed. To access the roof, one had to push open a trapdoor in the ceiling of the attic hallway, climb up into a low-roofed tunnel and then push open another trapdoor which opened out on to a flat roof with the most remarkable views across the river.

We were not, it seemed, the first to discover the secret roof terrace. There was already a pair of scruffy plastic chairs up there, some dead plants in pots, a little table.

I could barely believe that my father did not know about this space. He always complained about having a north-facing garden, that he could not enjoy the evening sun. Yet up here was a private oasis which caught the sun all day long.

The tiny squares of paper that Phin had been given at Kensington Market the week before turned out to be comprised of four even smaller squares of paper joined together. Each tiny segment had a picture of a smiling face on it.

‘What if we have a bad trip?’ I asked, feeling unutterably foolish using such language.

‘We should just have half each,’ said Phin. ‘To start off with.’

I nodded effusively. I’d have preferred to take none at all. I really wasn’t that type of person. But it was Phin and I would, to use the parental cliché, have followed him off a cliff if he’d asked me to.

I watched him swallow down the tiny shred and then he watched as I did the same. The sky was watercolour blue. The sun was weak but up here, in this trap, it felt warm against our skin. We felt nothing for quite some time. We talked about what we could see: the people sitting in their gardens, the boats idling down the Thames, the view of the power station on the other side of the river. After half an hour or so I relaxed, thinking that the acid was clearly fake, that nothing was going to happen, that I’d got away with it. But then I felt my blood begin to warm beneath my skin; I glanced upwards into the sky and saw that it was filled with pulsing white veins that became luminous and multi-toned, like mother of pearl, the longer I stared at them. I realised that the sky was not blue at all but that it was a million different colours all conspiring together to create a pale blue and that the sky was conniving and lying, that the sky was in fact much cleverer than us and that maybe everything we considered to be insentient was in fact cleverer than us and laughing at us. I looked at the leaves in the trees and questioned their greenness. Are you really green? I asked myself. Or are you actually tiny little particles of purple and red and yellow and gold all having a party and laughing, laughing, laughing. I glanced at Phin. I said, ‘Is your skin really white?’

He looked at his skin. He said, ‘No. It’s …’ He looked at me and laughed out loud. ‘I have scales! Look! I have scales. And you!’ He pointed at me with great hilarity. ‘You have feathers! Oh God,’ he said, ‘what have we become? We’re creatures!’

We chased each other round the roof for a minute, making animal noises. I stroked my feathers. Phin unfurled his tongue. We both expressed shock and awe at the length of it. ‘You have the longest tongue I have ever seen.’

‘That’s because I am a lizard.’ He rolled it back in and then out again. I watched it keenly. And when it came out again, I leaned in and trapped it between my teeth.

‘Ow!’ said Phin, grabbing his tongue between his fingers and laughing at me.

‘Sorry!’ I said. ‘I’m just a stupid bird. I thought it was a worm.’

And then we stopped laughing and sat in the plastic deckchairs and stared, stared, stared into the whirling aurora borealis above and our hands hung down side by side, our knuckles brushing every now and then, and each time I felt Phin’s skin touch mine I felt as though his very being was penetrating my epidermis and bits of his essence were swirling into my essence, making a soup of me and him and it was too too tantalising, I needed to plug myself into him so that I could capture all of his essence and my fingers wrapped themselves around his fingers and he let me, he let me hold his hand, and I felt him pour into me like when we went on a canal boat once and the man opened the lock and we watched the water flow from one place to another.

‘There,’ I said, turning to look at Phin. ‘There. You and me. We’re the same person now.’

‘We are?’ said Phin, looking at me with wide eyes.

‘Yes, look.’ I pointed at our hands. ‘We’re the same.’

Phin nodded and we sat then for some time, I don’t know how long, it might have been five minutes, it might have been an hour, our hands held together, staring into the sky and lost in our own strange chemically induced reveries.

‘We’re not having a bad trip, are we?’ I said eventually.

‘No,’ said Phin. ‘We’re having a good trip.’

‘The best trip,’ I said.

‘Yes,’ he agreed. ‘The best trip.’

‘We should live up here,’ I said. ‘Bring our beds up here and live up here.’