Private Games

Monday, 6 August 2012

A FORCE FIVE typhoon rampages through my brain, throwing daggers of lightning brighter than burning magnesium, and everything around me seems saturated with electric blues and reds that don’t shimmer or sparkle so much as sear and bleed.

That stupid bitch. She betrayed us. And Mundaho escaped a just vengeance. I feel like annihilating every monster in London.

But I’ll settle for one.

I’m more than aware that this move could upset a careful balance I’ve struck for more than fifteen years. If I handle this wrong, it could come back to haunt me.

The storm in my skull, however, won’t let me consider these ramifications for very long. Instead, like watching a flickering old movie, I see myself stick a knife in my mother’s thigh, again and again; and I remember in a cascade of raw emotion how good, how right it felt to have been wronged, and then avenged.

Petra is waiting for me when I reach my home at around four in the morning. Her eyes are sunken, fearful, and red. We are alone. The other sisters have gone on to new tasks.

‘Please, Cronus,’ she begins. ‘The fingerprint was a mistake.’

The typhoon spins furiously again in my mind, and it’s as though I’m looking at her down this whirling crackling funnel.

‘A mistake?’ I say in a soft voice. ‘Do you realise what you’ve done? You’ve called the dogs in around us. They can smell you, Andjela. They can smell your sisters. They can smell me. They’ve got a cage and gallows waiting.’

Petra’s face twists up in an anger equal to my own. ‘I believe in you, Cronus. I’ve given you my life. I killed both Chinese coaches for you. But yes, I made a mistake. One mistake!’

‘Not one,’ I reply in that same soft voice. ‘You left your wig in the wall at the lavatory at the gymnastics venue. They’ve got your DNA now too. It was impetuous. You did not follow the plan.’

Petra begins to shake and to cry. ‘What do you want me to do, Cronus? What can I do to make it right?’

For several moments I don’t reply, but then I sigh and walk towards her with open arms. ‘Nothing, sister,’ I say. ‘There’s nothing you can do. We fight on.’

Petra hesitates. Then she comes into my arms and hugs me so fiercely that for a moment I’m unsure what to do.

But then my mind seizes on the image of an IV line stuck in my arm and connected to a plastic bag of liquids, and for a fleeting instant I consider what that image has meant to me, how it has consumed me, driven me, made me.

I am much taller than Petra. So when I return her hug, my arms fall naturally around the back of her neck and press her cheek tightly to my chest.

‘Cronus,’ she begins, before she feels the pressure building.

She begins to choke.

‘No!’ she manages in a hoarse whisper and then thrashes violently in my arms, trying to punch and kick me.

But I know all too well how dangerous Petra is, how viciously she can fight if she is given a chance; and my grip on her neck is relentless and grows tighter and stronger before I take a swift step back, and then twist my hips sharply.

The action yanks Petra off her feet and swings her through the air with such force that when I whipsaw my weight back the other way, I hear the vertebrae in her neck crack and splinter as if struck by lightning.