I HAVE BEEN in the Home for a month or so and, though sometimes I still want to rebel with every ounce of my strength, I have settled in, I think. Like everything else in my life so far, my little revolt failed and I gave up and let my parents have their way with me. They made their hushed phone calls behind closed doors, settled the arrangements and my father delivered me to the Home, tucked discretely away in a quiet housing estate on Singapore’s northern outskirts, on a warm June afternoon. I have refused to talk to them ever since, and work at quietly blending into this new place. My indifference mistaken for compliance, I am thought a well-behaved girl and assigned simple housekeeping duties, sweeping the linoleum floors of the long corridors, replacing the dying flowers in slender vases in the visitors’ room.

     Done with the morning’s chore clearing out the rubbish in the rooms on the second floor, I go to look for Amy. I find her in the reading room, wiping table-tops and dusting the shelves filled with yellow-paged, hard-covered books nobody here ever reads. We use the books for our endless doodling and fill the narrow edges with meaningless marginalia. Amy often tears out random pages, just for the fun of it. ‘So nobody can know what happens next,’ she says.

     She is focusing intensely on a spot on a table, tiny beads of perspiration on her forehead and upper lip. ‘Hey, are you trying to bore a hole in the table?’ I ask.

     ‘What are you saying? Can’t you see this dark spot? I’ve been trying to get it out the whole morning,’ she says, gritting her teeth.

     I can’t see any stain or even a smear on the shiny surface of the table. I shrug, uncomfortable, and turn away to catch the peculiar look of another girl sitting at the other end of the reading room.

     ‘I’m so gonna kill the person who did this. I will wring her fucking neck!’

     ‘Don’t be crazy. There’s nothing there,’ I say.

     ‘What do you mean nothing?’ she says, moving her face close to mine so I can see clearly the hazel-coloured outline of her irises and the light sprinkling of freckles around her nose. ‘Are you so damn blind you can’t see it? This spot. Here,’ and she stabs the table with her index finger, the knuckle angry red from chewing.

     I pull the damp rag from her hand and throw it into the small blue pail on the table. At my touch, Amy withdraws her hands as if suddenly scalded, urgently checking her fingers for invisible burns. Her fingernails are gnawed to nothing, the flaring skin raw and swollen. She lifts her thumb to her mouth and begins to bite at it, then grabs the handle of the pail, shoulders me aside and storms toward the doorway, stops, turns sharply. ‘Forget it! Go fuck yourself for all I care,’ she hollers straight at me. ‘All this cleaning, for nothing. You think I’m that crazy?’

 

*   *   *

 

I’m sitting on one of the rotting wooden benches in the small park in the middle of the Home compound, chatting with Susie, who wears long sleeves to hide her eczema, and her scars. I peeped at her body once in the showers, saw the bumpy worm-like trails all over her arms and legs, and I couldn’t tear my eyes away. I didn’t know people do those kinds of things to their own bodies.

     Susie is telling me about her new diet plan when one of the Home assistants comes running up, panting, out of breath.

     ‘Have any of you talked to Amy this morning?’

     ‘Why? No, not me,’ Susie says. Both of them turn to me.

     ‘Nope, I haven’t seen her this morning,’ I lie.

     ‘Okay. Just checking.’

     ‘What happened? Is she okay?’ I ask.

     ‘She’s alright. Just feeling a bit jittery this morning is all.’

     ‘Amy’s always like that. Attention-seeker,’ Susie says, rolling her eyes in disgust.

     ‘She’s getting much better,’ the assistant says.

     ‘I don’t think so.’

 

*   *   *

 

Nobody is around when I sneak into the room Amy shares with three other girls. The curtains are drawn, the room dim and quiet. Amy is lying on her bed, staring at the ceiling, her lips moving wordlessly to some internal monologue. It’s quite common among the girls in the Home: you see them from time to time, conducting conversations with themselves, and look the other way. Amy’s hands are tied with cloth restraints and she is wearing a pair of white gloves. She looks up at me, her expression timid and frightened, as if caught in some shameful act.

     ‘You scared the hell outta me, you know that?’ she whispers, her eyes darting about for imagined eavesdroppers.

     ‘You feeling much better now? You were in such a diva mode this morning.’

     ‘I don’t know, maybe. I feel tired. They gave me some jabs,’ she says, her eyes pointing to the plaster patch on her right arm. ‘It hurts like crazy.’

     ‘You’re okay now. Don’t worry.’

     I run my fingers down her arms and the sides of her thin body and discover a patchwork of bandage and adhesive tape on her thighs, under the long white gown. I pull away and look at Amy. She has her eyes closed, taking in long drags of breath. I hold her gloved hand until she falls asleep, the strength in her fingers ebbing away. I keep on holding tightly, seized by a sudden fear she will somehow slip away from me.

 

*   *   *

 

Someone alerts the duty assistant about the new girl with the freshly broken face around midnight. All the lights on our level come on and the corridors begin to fill with shared whispers, nods and silent assents. The new girl stays in a room two doors from mine.

     ‘Who did this to you? What happened?’ the assistant demands.

     ‘Nothing,’ says one of the girls from that room, Clare. ‘She just fell down accidentally.’ Clare towers over most of the girls in the Home by a head or more, and has serious acne. Once I saw her slip a hand into the shorts of another new girl in the dining room.

     ‘Did she? How did she manage to break her face like this?’ The assistant lifts the new girl’s head, cradling it in a white-smocked arm. The girl sobs non-stop. The assistant dabs at the tears, mucus and blood on her bloating face with a handful of tissue, glaring at Clare who shrugs her shoulders and looks around at the crowd gathering outside the room. She smiles briefly at someone, then reverts to blank-faced innocence.

     The new girl keeps her head down and doesn’t look up.

     ‘Can anyone tell me what really happened?’ The assistant scans the room, searching for signs of guilt or complicity. Two medical assistants appear, accompanied by the director, who has been in charge of the Home since it opened ten years ago, each of those years having exacted a bitter toll on her face, the skin a disease-pale sallow, deep wrinkles at the edges of her eyes and mouth, and her perpetual dark eye-rings. To us, the inner group, she is known as Smelly Cunt. She gives each of us in the room a penetrating look and, without a word exchanged, deduces the whole story.

     ‘Take her away and clean her up,’ Smelly Cunt says, nodding to the medical assistants. As the new girl limps out, leaning heavily on their support, I notice the darkening bruises around her ankles where Susie and I held her with all our might half an hour ago. A tiny rivulet of blood trickles down her inner thigh.

     ‘I want all the girls from this room in my office now,’ says Smelly Cunt, her tone daring defiance. Nobody speaks and the crowd begins to disperse. I glance back as I leave the room and catch Clare smiling at me, a sharp conspiratorial smile.

 

*   *   *

 

Susie sneaks into my room, crawls under the covers and wakes me up with her cold fingers. Her voice is soft, trembling, and spooning me from behind, her lips close to my ear, she whispers, ‘I can’t sleep at all. I tried to, but I just can’t. Can I sleep with you tonight? Just for tonight. I don’t want to sleep in my bed. It’s too small for me. I feel I can fall off anytime.’

     ‘Okay, just keep still, and be quiet. The rest are already asleep.’

     ‘I don’t think we should have done that. You know, helping Clare and the other girls. It doesn’t seem right.’

     ‘No one will know. You don’t tell anyone, and I won’t tell anyone either. The girl will be okay.’

     ‘Are you sure? She looked pretty bad, all that blood. Clare shouldn’t have punched her so hard. She doesn’t deserve it.’

     ‘She’ll be alright. She’ll recover,’ I say, hoping to end the conversation. I hear Susie sigh behind me. She pulls the covers towards her. Looking out the meshed windows, I can see dark clouds moving across the lambent crescent of the moon. All the windows on this floor and the next have double reinforced locks and cannot be opened from the inside. I heard a girl jumped from the third storey of my block last year after a quarrel with her parents on visiting day. Her skull cracked wide open and there was blood and brains all over the ground. The girl who had to clear up the mess said the blood looked almost like ketchup, except it was harder to clean with a mop.

     ‘Are you still awake?’ Susie nudges me, and inches her body closer to mine, placing her hand around my waist. ‘What are you thinking?’

     I keep still, letting my silence answer her questions. Wisps of cloud trail across the surface of the moon. I breathe in deeply, counting seconds in my head. Exhale.

     ‘Nothing. Go to sleep. Don’t think so much about it. It will pass. All of us have to go through it anyway.’

     ‘I guess you’re right,’ Susie says, then: ‘There’s nothing to be worried about.’ Adjusting her head on the pillow, she withdraws her hand from my waist and mumbles something under her breath. It sounds like a prayer, but I can’t make out the words. Soon she is fast asleep, her light breath warm on the nape of my neck, like the gentle flapping of a dying butterfly.

     I bring my legs to my chest, hugging them tightly, bracing myself against an unknown cold. I squeeze my eyes shut and try to force sleep to come, but it won’t. I try a prayer too, but it doesn’t seem sincere, so I give up. I stare at the crescent moon for a long time, until my eyes grow heavy and I slip away into a slumber.

     That night, I dream about the new girl and all of us surrounding her, pinning her down. This time she doesn’t struggle; she just lies on the floor, spreading her legs as wide as she can. When Clare inserts the blunt end of the toilet brush into her, she doesn’t even let out a cry. And when Clare pulls out the brush there is a red lumpy object stuck to its end dripping thick drops of blood. At first I can’t tell what it is, then it opens its tiny eyes and stares straight at me. I let go my grip on the new girl’s leg and push myself roughly away. But it keeps its unflinching glare on me. I try to yell, but no sound comes from my mouth. The bloody, deformed object tilts back its bulbous head and begins to laugh. This strange, unearthly sound reaches deep inside me and impales my heart with a cold fear.

 

*   *   *

 

On her better days, Amy and I spend our afternoons lying on a tiny patch of grass under the angsana tree in the large field beside the compound. The air is heavy with humidity and the sweet fragrance of butterfly ginger plants blooming nearby. Sunbursts flash through the swaying branches causing us to blink and shut our eyes. Sometimes Amy hums to herself, a song remembered from before she came to the Home. More often it’s a tune she hears on the radio when she passes the assistant’s station while doing her assigned chores. She has an elephant’s memory for music. She told me once she can play seven musical instruments. I only half believe what she says; who knows, she may be lying again.

     ‘Do you ever think about escaping from this place?’ Amy asks.

     ‘No, never. I like it here.’

     ‘Never? Why? I don’t believe you.’

     ‘It’s peaceful and quiet in here. You can’t get that outside. Seriously, you can’t.’

     ‘But if you could, would you?’

     ‘Depends,’ I say. ‘I don’t know. It really depends.’

     ‘Would you escape with me if ever there’s a chance?’

     ‘Maybe, I don’t know.’

     We look up at the broken sky through the intertwining branches of the tree, and ponder each other’s words, weighing the deeper meanings.

 

*   *   *

 

Our escape comes earlier than expected.

     Amy swipes the car keys from her father’s jacket left hanging over the chair during a visit when he’s distracted with a business call. She sneaks out of the visitors’ room silently and comes straight to find me. ‘Come on, I don’t have much time to wait. Do you want to come with me or not?’

     I look out the window, the open sky pure and calm, and decide to follow her. Amy slides into her father’s platinum Jaguar, starts the engine, tells me to fasten my seatbelt, and revs out of the car park. We tailgate a delivery van, the lowering barricade screeching across the car roof like nails on a chalk board, then Amy hits the accelerator and the Jaguar purrs with speed. In the side mirror I see the Indian security guard running out from the guardhouse, gesturing wildly as he shrinks away.

     Amy punches a button and the windows open, a rush of warm air gushing into the chilled interior. One hand on the steering wheel, she flips away loose strands of hair from her forehead, eyes straight ahead. She looks determined. Even warrior-like, I think, which amuses me. How does a sixteen-year-old girl learn to drive? I hang my arm out of the window and rest my cheek on it, letting the stinging onrush of air hit my wide-open eyes like tiny darts until they blind with tears. My head spins with the dangerous loops and curves of escape and freedom.

     Amy drives fast, heading nowhere, the speedometer resting on one-twenty, the traffic outside a neck-wrenching blur. She taps the radio on, scans the stations, finds some rock and turns the volume to max.

     ‘Can you find some cigarettes?’ Amy asks. I rouse myself from my daydreams and open the compartment behind the T-shaped gear stick. ‘Two packs of Marlboro Menthol and a gold lighter,’ I report, taking out a stick, lighting it and passing it to her. She sucks deeply on the cigarette, holds the smoke, exhales slowly, the bluish plume streaming out the open window. The skin on my arm hanging outside the car feels tight and sunburnt.

     ‘You’re not afraid your father will report us to the police?’ I ask.

     ‘Don’t worry. If there’s one thing I know about my father, it’s that he won’t do anything that makes him lose face,’ she says, throwing me a grin.

     ‘Do you know it was my dad who taught me to drive when I was thirteen?’ Amy says after a brief silence. ‘It was always around the estate where we stayed, no further. After a while, it just got boring. What is a Jaguar for anyway, if not for going the distance, right?’ Amy has a playful sparkle in her eyes.

     ‘Guess so. I don’t know how to drive.’

     ‘It’s easy. You want to learn now?’

     ‘You’re crazy! No way! I’d rather sit back and do nothing.’

     ‘Lazy pig!’

     ‘Bitch!’

     We laugh, and our laughter rises high above the thumping bass line of the Green Day song on the radio.

     A scruffy dog darts out from a roadside bush along the East Coast Parkway and we hit it head-on with a wet thump and feel the rumble under the car. Amy slams the brake pedal and the car skids along the shoulder, brushing its flank along the black-and-yellow Armco barrier. Amy shifts into reverse and the car whirls back to the dead body. We jump out in unison.

     ‘Stupid dog. Shit. Running onto the road like that. It really deserves to die.’ Amy curses the dark mass of blood and organs on the black tarmac, the only distinguishable feature left on the squashed face its bared fangs, frighteningly white and sharp against the pulp of flesh and bone.

     ‘It didn’t know what was coming,’ I say. ‘It couldn’t react in time.’

     ‘Yeah, stupid dog, stupid dog….’ Amy’s voice gets softer as she edges nearer the carcass. She kneels down and pulls away a loose paw from the sticky mess. The flesh and tendons of the paw stubbornly resist being separated from the body, before it finally rips away.

     ‘We got to go now before anyone stops to ask,’ I say, aware that the passing cars are slowing down to watch our little drama.

     Holding the bloodied paw, Amy walks back without a second look. I look at the dead dog for a few moments more before heading back to the car.

 

*   *   *

 

‘Take it!’ Amy throws the dog’s paw into my lap. I flick it from my body, but not before it leaves blobs of congealed blood on my shirt. ‘Shit!’

     ‘Don’t be a pussy. It’s not going to come to life. It’s a memento,’ Amy wipes the blood from each hand along the sides of the driver’s seat while keeping her eyes on the road. She chuckles and lifts her fingers to her nose. ‘It smells foul, the shitty thing. How am I going to wash it off?

     ‘Then why did you take it?’ I give her a fed-up look.

     ‘I don’t know. It looks cute, in a way.’ The speedometer shows one-forty now, the car gliding along smoothly. I stare at the paw lying near my feet and touch it with my toes. The rough fur feels stubby and synthetic, like a badly trimmed rug. I rub my big toe slowly against the rough paw pads.

     ‘I used to have a dog, when I was about seven or eight,’ Amy says, reaching for a cigarette from the packet I tossed on the dashboard. I nudge the pack towards her and she draws out a stick. I flick the lighter and bring it to her. She exhales a cloudy puff of menthol-scented smoke.

     ‘But she died giving birth. A stupid kid who lived next door sneaked up on my dog, and tried to frighten her with a stick. My dog was about to pop the first puppy but got scared and ran, the puppy dangling halfway out of her body, like a piece of meat. By the time we caught her, the puppy has choked to death and my dog died soon after from losing too much blood. None of the other puppies lived.’ Amy holds back her tears. ‘I wanted to kill him, the little prick.’

     The long expressway stretches ahead of us, holding out its possibilities and dangers. I imagine us crashing into another car and burning up in an explosion of purifying flames. Beyond the expressway, dusk is streaking the sky, the sun in its final descent on the far horizon, the last rays flaring off the Jaguar’s shiny surface like camera flashes.

     Amy signals right and exits the expressway. Making a swift turn, she drives into an open-air car park and stops. She puts her head on the steering wheel.

     ‘I’m so tired. I can’t go on anymore.’

     ‘Then don’t. We can stay here. You can rest all you want,’ I say.

     ‘Okay.’

     I get out and run my hand along the body of the Jaguar, stretching my legs to loosen the tension. The car feels warm like another person. I look around. There are two other cars parked side by side, about a hundred metres away, but otherwise the place is deserted. I hear the car door close and turn to see Amy walking away.

     ‘Where are you going?’

     ‘I don’t know. I just want to walk.’

     ‘Then wait for me.’ I run up to join her and we walk towards a clearing between the thickets of trees. A pebble-strewn path winds haphazardly among the trees, rubbish scattered randomly over the shrubs. The opening chorus of a nocturnal choir of toads and crickets fills the air.

     ‘Do you think we’ll get raped by a stranger?’

     ‘You wish, you slut!’ Amy shoves me and I punch her.

     Amy walks steadily in front, and I trail behind, watching the movements of her smooth calf muscles. We hear strange sounds coming from the undergrowth, something falls and lands heavily on the soft ground, the leaves rustle with creeping night creatures. We stay on the path until we reach another break in the trees.

     ‘I haven’t seen the sea in such a long time,’ Amy says. ‘Have you?’

     Emerging from the thick cover of the forest, I stand unevenly on the dirty white sand of a tiny strip of beach. The still, grimy sea reflects the last rays of a drowning sun. We take off our shoes and walk down along the tideline, cooling our heels with the wet sand. I kick up a clod of sand and watch it arc and disintegrate. Amy picks up something.

     ‘Bet you never seen a used condom before,’ she says, pushing the lumpish translucent latex in my face. It looks like the cast-off skin of a snake. ‘Gross,’ I say. ‘There’s still some semen in it. Throw it away. It’s revolting. And it’s leaking!’

     Amy shakes the used condom in my face again, doubling over with laughter, then runs to the water’s edge and hurls it into the ocean. From a distance, a horn blares from the belly of a huge rusty ship anchored offshore. We walk slowly towards a concrete-and-steel pier that juts out into the sea, climbing over a rotting tree trunk that lies on the sand like a beached whale. We run our fingers across the velvety smoothness of the mosses growing on what’s left of the bark on its trunk.

     Nearing the pier, we see a few people, mostly couples, at its farthest end. The vast sky is gradually beaten into a dark purple-blue bruise, and as we step off the sand and onto the concrete steps leading up to the wide walkway of the pier, an ear-piercing whirling sound cuts through the still air and the darkness above is ripped apart as if by some giant hand prying it open from inside out. Torrent after torrent of sparks and flashes explode overhead, like some celestial battle scene, the dipping fading lights the fallen and the dead. I hold my breath and my heart aches with longing and awe. I would drop to my knees if not for Amy’s arm linked tightly around mine, keeping me upright.

     Amy cries out, ‘Fireworks! I can’t believe it! They’re so beautiful. Look!’

     ‘Yes … fireworks … unbelievable….’ That I can even speak surprises me.

     ‘Is it a special day today?’ Amy asks loudly, nudging me to continue walking.

     ‘I don’t know,’ I reply. ‘But this is definitely something.’

     Walking down the pier, we come closer to the couples standing statue-still, heads cocked, eyes and open faces reflecting the bursts of light in the night sky.

     A faint image, the memory of a memory, plays at the margins of my mind. I block it and others that fight to be remembered as each new explosion eclipses the last. Now is all that matters, a voice in my head resounds – be alive, savour every moment. I close my eyes and feel the thump of each firework like a heartbeat.

     The fireworks soon become sporadic and then end with a silence of deep reverie, the air heavy with the acrid metallic smell of sulphur, and it feels like the dawn of time, the enveloping silence taut with unbearable anticipation and bleakness. Lonesome lights from the lampposts cast long shadows on the walkway of the pier.

     ‘Beautiful things never last long,’ Amy murmurs, her eyes searching the heavens. ‘One moment brightness, then nothing. Just another empty sky,’

     ‘It doesn’t matter,’ I say. ‘We are here, we saw it and that’s it. It’s enough.’ I turn to walk back down the pier. The couples standing around begin to wander away, slipping out of view.

     We let the rising moon show us the way back to the car. Trudging across the white-glowing sand and along the winding path through the dark forest, we tumble out into the car park, our T-shirts, soaked with perspiration, clinging to our backs. Amy unlocks the car and we get in. She turns the ignition key and the lights on the dashboard come up, a sudden blast of cold air sending tingling chills over our sweaty bodies.

     ‘What do you want to do now? We can’t stay out here forever. They’ll find us eventually,’ I say, brushing sand from my feet and bringing my knees to my chest.

     ‘Ha, maybe Smelly Cunt has already sent out her dogs to find us,’ Amy says. ‘Packs of bitches.’

     I look out the front window of the car. The car park is empty. ‘Where do you want to go now? Do you want to go back at all?’

     ‘I don’t know. Are we lost? Do you know the way back?’

     ‘I think so, but I don’t know where we are now.’ Amy stares out the side window at a nearby lamppost, a swarm of flying insects clustering at the flickering light. She picks at a dry scab on her elbow and it bleeds afresh. She doesn’t notice the oozing blood.

     ‘I don’t want to head back. But I don’t want to stay around here. It’s so quiet, there’s nobody around.’ She looks out each side of the car, turns to check through the rear window. ‘What’s the worst thing that can happen to us?’

     ‘I don’t know. Murder? Rape?’ I reply.

     ‘Well, it beats going back to that fucking place, right? Anywhere is better than that stinking shithole.’

     Amy switches the air con to max and adjusts the dial so cold air streams straight at her face. We hear the loud grunting roar of a car speeding along a nearby road. The dark blood on Amy’s seat looks like a small patch of shadow.

     After a while, Amy speaks. ‘So why were you put in the Home? What’s your story?’

     ‘Nothing. It’s none of your business,’ I say, turning my head to look outside.

     ‘Come on, what’s the shame in telling me? Anyway I’ve heard your story from the other girls.’

     ‘What did you hear? It’s all bullshit! Nothing’s true.’

     ‘Not what I heard. You tried to kill it yourself, didn’t you?’ I press my forehead against the window pane. It feels cold.

     ‘There’s nothing to be ashamed of. All the girls in there are the same anyway. You, me, everyone – all the same.’

     ‘I don’t want to talk about it. Can you please keep quiet?’

     ‘No, not until you tell me how you did it.’

     The fact of the matter is that I can’t remember a single thing after it happened. It was just blood, and more blood, as if I was bleeding myself empty, pouring out like oil from a punctured drum. My mother’s hollow voice, then my father’s, then darkness.

     ‘I don’t remember, really. I seriously don’t,’ I say.

     ‘How can you “don’t remember”? You’re lying.’

     ‘Then believe what you heard. I don’t care.’

     I open the front compartment and sift around the contents for something to eat. A packet of chewing gum, mint-flavoured. I unwrap a stick and chew on it. I throw the rest of the pack into Amy’s lap and she puts two sticks in her mouth then starts to chomp like it’s a piece of tough meat.

     In the hospital, still drugged, I hear my mother say to my father: ‘How can she shame us like that? How can she do such a thing? I don’t understand.’ My father mumbles something in return but I can’t hear what he’s saying, his voice coming to me in waves of pitch and tone, without form.

     ‘Shit happens to anyone,’ Amy says. ‘You can’t stop it. It’s just the way it is, no matter how hard you try.’

     ‘Maybe. Or maybe some of us just got it worse.’

     ‘Yes maybe. But we are still here, aren’t we?’

     ‘Yes, we are,’ I reply.

     We listen to the soft hum of the air con as it gradually lulls us to sleep. I drift into a dream, where things and people and events fall in and out of focus and it’s impossible to know for sure what is and what isn’t. I jerk awake and it’s the middle of the night, light rain pattering on the windows and smudging the view outside, liquefied gold and silver trickling down the windshield. I turn to Amy in a panic. She is sleeping all scrunched up in a tight ball. I close my eyes and go back to sleep, slipping into my half-remembered dream. The next time I open my eyes, it is early morning and the rain has stopped.

     Outside, the car park is washed clean – the wet sparkling tarmac, the shiny lampposts, the lush green trees and shrubs. My head feels light, for once my thoughts are silent, and I have to focus very hard to get back into my own self, the reality of my skin. Morning light pierces like a blade and draws from me a deep hunger for joy and beauty I thought I’d never feel again. Everything is all sharp points – the water droplets look like precious pearls waiting to be harvested. Amy mutters something in her sleep and I lean in closer to catch her words: ‘Fuck, it’s not the same anymore.’

     I quietly open the door. The air is refreshing, invigorating. From behind a small thorny bush, a wet scraggy mongrel emerges and stands staring at me for a long time, its lean muscled body tense, scarred head erect. Its paws are the same colour as the one Amy took from the dead dog, dusty brown with streaks of grey. It wags its tail decisively, trots across the empty street and vanishes into the bushes. Later, when I tried searching for the severed paw it is nowhere to be found in the car.

 

*   *   *

 

In the end, we choose the path of least resistance and drive back to the Home. Smelly Cunt harangues us for nearly an hour. We look at the floor the whole time, nodding our heads and praying in our hearts for time to pass quickly so we can return to our rooms.

     And after we are finally free to go back to our rooms, we run into Susie who is in an excited state. ‘Thought you’d left for good?’ she says, inserting herself between us, taking a vice-like grip of our arms.

     ‘Why did you come back anyway? Is it so bad out there?’

     An assistant walks past and gives us a belligerent look. Susie ignores her.

     ‘It can’t be worse than here.’

     ‘No, but it’s better here,’ I say.

     Susie is bursting to tell us what happened after our escape. The new girl returned to her room from the recovery ward. She had somehow got hold of a scalpel, which she hid under her gown. Being all calm and quiet, the assistants didn’t think she needed restraints and left her alone in the room. For the rest of the day, everyone avoided her, ignoring her presence. After lights-out, when everyone was asleep, the new girl went to the room where Clare stayed. No one heard a thing. She slit Clare’s throat from ear to ear. All Clare could manage was a terrible shriek, which of course woke everyone up; then there was chaos – Clare trying to grab at the new girl, spraying great geysers of blood everywhere. ‘Like a ghost from a Japanese horror movie,’ Susie adds.

     ‘You should have seen the blood in the room, it was everywhere, like nothing you’ve ever seen before,’ Susie says, her face contorted with mock outrage and shock.

     ‘Don’t be gross,’ I say. ‘So did she die?’

     ‘What did you think? Of course she died. The assistants had to use three body bags to haul Clare’s body away. Blood was still leaking out when they found her.’

     ‘What about the new girl?’ Amy asks.

     Susie shrugs her shoulders, feigning contempt. ‘Not sure what happened to her, but I think they’ve locked her up in solitary in the basement. Last I heard the police had been notified. Freaking drama, right?’

     I shake my head, and the three of us pause at the doorway of Clare’s room. The floor is clean and spotless, all the beds neatly tucked. Not a trace of evidence to support Susie’s story.

     ‘You never know,’ I say. ‘It can happen to anyone.’

 

*   *   *

 

Amy and I didn’t say much to each other that morning but we both knew we’d have to go back sooner or later. She woke up not long after me, with a sudden jolt as if someone had punched her in the stomach. She was gasping, looking frantically around the car. Seeing me beside her, she laid her head back on the car seat.

     ‘Should we?’

     Flooring the accelerator, we sped out of the car park and drove up to the expressway, merging with the traffic in the morning rush hour.

     Whenever the Jaguar stopped, I would look into the car next to us, at the faces of the people. Sometimes it was a couple, or a family with a child or two strapped in the back seats. The children would return my stare with curious expressions. The adults just looked straight ahead. In one car, a man kissed a woman – his wife, mistress, friend? – and she pushed him away playfully, her face flushed with a secret happiness. I caught her eye and she smiled. For the briefest of moments, I could feel her happiness, and I suddenly felt like an intruder, as if I have no right to be sharing her secret, her joy.

     ‘You look like shit,’ Amy said. ‘Your hair’s in such a mess.’

     ‘You don’t look so good yourself. Look in the mirror!’ We laughed out loud.

     ‘But I feel great, for once, for the first time in a long time.’

     ‘Then don’t let go. Hold it in!’

     The sun had broken through the blanket of billowy clouds and hung like a bright blinding orb in the clean blue sky. With the morning traffic thinning, the Jaguar began to devour the miles. We still didn’t know the way back, but it didn’t matter. Where we were heading – the Home or a car crash – was of no consequence. Nothing seemed to matter.

     Amy smiled to herself and reached for my hand.

     ‘You’re feeling okay?’

     ‘Never been better.’