Free A Savage Hunger (Paula Maguire 4) by Claire McGowan Page B

numbers. I refuse to hear how fat they’ve made me. He feels down my arms for hair growth, and in my mouth for the gum recession that would mean I’ve been puking up. His hands move over my ribs and down. He stops at my legs. I close my eyes.
    Alice. You’re bleeding.
    I act stupid. Oh?
    Yes. I feel his gloved hands on my thigh, moving up the line of the blood that has come down. I close my eyes, bite my lip so hard it must be bleeding too. Alice, have your periods started again?
    I don’t know. I never have any.
    I’d be surprised if menstruation recommenced at this bodyweight . To the woman again. Not me. I catch Charlotte’s eye and there’s a glimpse of her back again. We’re winning. We beat them. But of course, no, we’re not. We will never win. He pulls my knickers aside and puts his finger inside me, right up inside. In me. I nearly scream. I thought it didn’t look like menstrual blood. For reference, girls, that’s much darker and thicker. I doubt either of you have seen much of it.
    Charlotte is suddenly alive. You stupid fucker! You’ve never had a period, you never will! Stop telling us what it’s like!
    He smiles at the woman. Would you please restrain Miss Yu? And be careful, because I think we’ll find some cutting implement about her person.
    They go at her like she’s an animal, and the energy is back, the strength. She’s cornered. The woman reaches for her wrist to put her in restraints, and I know it’s the hand with the razor in it, and I almost pass out – go, go, do it, Charlotte. And she does. A flick of her hand and the woman is howling, and there’s blood pattering to the floor. Big red drops of it. Hey, guess what, we all bleed the same.
    He’s on it, of course – the drawer, the needle, Charlotte’s eyes closing – but it’s enough. It’s enough to see the rage in his eyes, and hear the woman sobbing, as if her face was anything nice to start with. Do stop crying , he says. He looks at me as if he’d like to sedate me too, but I’m meek as a lamb. From somewhere in my deep self, dry as a bare riverbed, I find some tears. She cut me, sir, she made me.
    I know it’s what Charlotte would want. It doesn’t matter what you say. It’s the words in your head that count. And mine are saying I’m going to get away from you, no matter what it takes.

Chapter Ten
     
    Being stuck was a common feature in families of the long-missing. Instead of moving to a new place with new memories, people often refused to leave, waiting fruitlessly in case one day the lost person came walking in the door. Hello, did you miss me? Paula knew it well – as an RUC officer her father should have moved around every few years, for safety’s sake, but they’d stayed in the last place Margaret had been seen. Yvonne O’Neill was another one of the lost. She’d gone out one summer’s day to help at the church that had stood on her doorstep all her life. The height of a warm day, where it begins to collapse, exhausted, under its own heat. A haze rising up from the ground. Tarmac melting on the road. It was quicker to go the back way to the church, but that would mean passing the Garretts’ house. So she went by the main road. In a yellow dress, carrying white roses from her mother’s garden, wrapped in the day’s newspaper. Planning to leave them at the shrine. Walking up the dusty path, the yew trees silent overhead. The flowers were found in the church, arranged in vases, but the newspaper had never turned up, and neither had Yvonne.
    And now Paula and Corry were calling on her mother, stirring up memories again. Dolores O’Neill was over eighty, but still lived alone in the farmhouse. The surrounding land had been sold off over the years, and the livestock too, but still she would not go, waiting for her missing child. You could even see the church from the kitchen window, a few hundred yards down the road and up the stone path. No distance at all. But far enough to get lost in.
    ‘This is