Spotter
The elevator didn't stop at a hallway. Lou had been bracing for one the whole way up: a corridor, a door, a mat, some kind of threshold where she could stand for a second with her gym bag and make a decision. Instead the numbers climbed to the top, the elevator slowed and sighed, and the doors slid open directly onto somebody's home.
She stood there in the elevator with the bag over her shoulder and looked at it.
It was dark, the first thing. Dark in the way rich people's houses were dark on purpose: black stone floors, black walls, low gold lamps, candles burning in glass on every surface even though it was four in the afternoon. Purple velvet. A great deal of purple velvet. A long marble bar with bottles lit from underneath. A white plaster bust on a plinth, some Roman woman with no pupils. And the whole far side of the room was glass, floor to ceiling, and beyond it a terrace with plants and more candles, and beyond that the city going on for miles, and the river, grey in the winter light.
The elevator made a small polite sound. Lou realised the doors were about to close on her, and stepped out.
There, she thought. That was the threshold. A rubber strip in an elevator floor. She'd stepped over it without noticing.
"Lou," said Theo.
He was sitting at a kitchen island the size of a small boat, off to one side, with a laptop open in front of him and a mug beside it. He was in shirtsleeves. He looked, Lou thought, completely at home. He looked like a man who had sat at that island most mornings for years.
"Theo," she said.
She'd known Theo for six years. He was the one who booked her and paid her and called her at nine in the morning to ask if she was free on the twelfth. She had always liked him in the slightly impatient way you like people who do their jobs properly. She looked at him now in his shirtsleeves at the island and he looked back at her. He wasn't surprised. Not at her coming here, not at the gym bag, not at the look on her face. He was expecting her. He'd been expecting exactly this.
Two people, she thought.
Theo nodded at her once, very slightly. Then he looked back at his laptop, and she understood that he was giving her a minute.
"You came," Morgana said, coming in from somewhere down a corridor. "Theo said you would." She was in black leggings and an old grey T-shirt with the neck cut out of it, and her hair was tied back and she was barefoot on the stone. "This way."
Lou followed it across the room.
She hadn't meant to look at the windows. She looked anyway, in passing, the way you glance at anything large. Beyond the glass the terrace ran the whole length of the apartment, and halfway along it the pool began.
It was a long dark rectangle set into the stone, its far edge running right out to the sky so the water looked as if it went over the side of the building and kept going. It was lit from underneath. In the grey afternoon it glowed: a clear pale blue-green, the colour of a swimming pool at night with the lights on.
Lou stopped walking.
She knew the colour. She had seen it almost a month ago, very small, in the eyes of the woman in her passenger seat, and every time since then that she had closed her own.
Her hand went to her collar and found the medal through her sweater.
Ahead of her, Morgana had stopped at the mouth of the corridor and turned back. It looked at Lou standing there with her hand at her throat. Then it looked past her through the glass at the pool, for a moment, and back.
It didn't say anything. It waited.
Lou let go of the medal and kept walking.
The gym was a long room at the end of the corridor with black rubber on the floor and one whole wall of mirror and another wall of window. There was a rack with a bar in it, a bench, dumbbells in a neat row from small to absurd, a rowing machine and a treadmill pointed at the view. It smelled faintly of rubber and very faintly of sweat. It was better than any gym Lou had ever paid for in her life.
"Jesus," she said, and then, "Sorry," and then, "No, I'm not, actually."
Morgana laughed.
They warmed up on the rower and the treadmill. Lou's knees complained the way they always did, a dull creak like an old floor, and then settled. Morgana went through a routine on a mat in front of the mirror, a long careful series of stretches that Lou recognised, after a minute, as something a physiotherapist had once taught Morgana Gray. She'd seen her do it backstage at a festival four years ago, sitting on a road case with her headphones on, not talking to anyone.
The body knew it. Lou watched it go through every movement exactly, without having to think, the way Lou's hands knew a paradiddle. But the face doing it was different. The old Morgana had stretched with her eyes closed and her jaw set, as if the body were a job she was getting through. This one did it with its eyes open, watching itself in the mirror, and when it pulled one arm across its chest and something in its shoulder made a small sound, it made a face of pure interest.
"Does that hurt?" Lou asked.
"Yes."
"Bad hurt or good hurt?"
It thought about this, still holding the stretch.
"I don't know the difference yet," it said.
They did legs, because Lou said they were doing legs. Lou did goblet squats with a dumbbell held to her chest and her knees told her about every one of them. Morgana did proper squats in the rack with a bar across her shoulders, more weight on it than Lou would have tried at thirty. It went down slowly and came up slowly, and its face in the mirror at the bottom of each one was red and concentrating and very human.
"Morgana did this four days a week," it said between sets, breathing hard. "For six years. I didn't know why."
"Now you do?"
"Now I know what it's for." It shook out its legs. "It's so the body does what you ask. When you need it to." It looked at itself in the mirror, sweat darkening the neck of the grey T-shirt. "I didn't think of a body as something you had to ask."
Lou thought about her knees. She thought about her left hand, which ached most mornings now, deep in the joints, in a way she hadn't told anyone. She thought about thirty-one years of asking her body to do things and the body agreeing a little less each year.
"You have to ask nicely," she said. "And then it gets old and starts saying no."
Morgana looked at her in the mirror.
"Bench," Lou said, before it could say anything. "Come on. I'll spot you."
Lying on her back on the bench with the bar in her hands and Morgana standing over her head to spot, Lou had the second thought of the afternoon that she would have to confess to someone eventually.
It was standing right behind her, looking down. Its hands were under the bar, not touching it, a few inches away, ready. It had its eyes on her elbows. It was counting her reps under its breath. If she got stuck at the bottom, if her arms gave out, the only thing between the bar and her throat would be a pair of hands belonging to the thing she'd seen in the van.
She did eight. On the ninth she slowed at the bottom, and two fingers touched the bar from above, very lightly, not lifting it, just there, and she pushed it up the rest of the way herself and racked it.
"Good," it said.
Lou lay there on the bench looking up at the ceiling and breathing.
It hadn't helped. It hadn't needed to. It had touched the bar to tell her it was there, and then let her do it. That was what a good spotter did. She had trained with maybe a dozen people in her life who knew that, and most of them were drummers.
"Your turn," she said, and sat up.
Afterwards Morgana went to shower. Lou sat on the edge of the bench for a while in the empty gym, her shirt stuck to her back, drinking from her water bottle and looking at the city through the window, and her legs were already starting to feel it.
Then she went back down the corridor to the kitchen.
Theo was still at the island. He'd made fresh coffee; there was a second mug beside the pot, clean and upside down, waiting. He turned it over and poured without asking and slid it across to her.
Lou sat down on the stool opposite. Neither of them said anything.
"How long?" she said finally.
"July." Theo didn't pretend not to understand. "She told me the night of the stream. I saw it a few days later."
Lou held the mug in both hands. She looked at Theo in his shirtsleeves, the man who had paid her for every session for six years, and she tried to see what was different about him. She couldn't see anything. That was the problem. She hadn't been able to see anything in the van either, until it let her.
"Can I ask you something," she said. "And you tell me the truth."
"Yes."
"Is it you?" She heard how it sounded and made herself keep going. "Are you. I mean, when you sit here. When you work for her. When you say yes to things." She stopped. "Is that you saying it? Or is it..." She didn't know how to end the sentence. "My mother would say possessed. I don't know what the word is. I don't know if there is one."
Theo looked at her for a long moment.
Then he put his own mug down, and folded his hands on the marble in front of him, the way he did when he was about to explain a contract.
"The first thing she ever gave me," he said, "was that she can't get into my head."
Lou stared at him.
"I don't know how it works," Theo said. "She told me what she did. I didn't understand most of it. I'm not sure she could explain it if she tried." He looked down at his hands. "It feels like a wall. Like there's something thick between my head and everything outside it. Not to keep me in. It doesn't stop me going anywhere. It feels like when you're a kid and you're inside and it's raining and the door's shut." He stopped. "Safe. That's the word. It feels safe."
"And you believe her? That that's what it is?"
"I believe what I feel," Theo said. "And I believe her. I don't know if those are the same thing." He picked up the mug again and didn't drink from it. "I'm sharper than I've ever been. I sleep better. I haven't had a cold since July. I feel like the person I was supposed to be before I spent ten years running on energy drinks and other people's emergencies." He shrugged, very slightly. "She did that. And she did it so she couldn't do the other thing. To me. Ever."
Lou didn't say anything. She sat with her hands around the hot mug and looked at him and thought about that. The first thing. Of everything it could have done, and it could have done anything, Lou knew that now: the first thing it did for the person closest to it was lock itself out.
That's what it would do, said the part of her that had copied the verse out ten times in Sister Imelda's class. That's exactly what it would do, to make you believe this.
She listened to that voice. She let it finish. Then she looked at Theo, who had been with her through all of it, every morning since the hospital, and who sat at her kitchen island in his shirtsleeves with his hands folded and felt safe.
"Okay," Lou said.
Theo looked at her. He wanted to ask her something; she could see it. She waited.
"You won't tell anyone," he said at last. It wasn't quite a question. It was the voice he used on promoters.
"No."
He looked at her a moment longer, measuring. Then he nodded, once, and Lou understood that this was what he'd been waiting for since she stepped out of the elevator, and that he had decided to believe her for the same reason she'd decided to believe him.
"Okay," he said.
He closed his laptop and stood up and put his mug in the dishwasher. He took his jacket off the back of the stool.
"She'll want to order everything on the menu," he said, shrugging it on. "Don't let her. There's a place on Ninth that does the good dumplings, the number's on the fridge." He paused at the elevator. "And she'll ask you what you want to watch and then say she doesn't mind. She minds. Make her choose."
The doors opened for him and closed again, and he was gone.
She ordered everything on the menu.
Lou had stopped her twice, and given up on the third attempt, and so they sat on the enormous low purple couch facing the enormous black television with eleven cartons of food spread across a marble table that probably cost more than Lou's van. Morgana had showered and changed into a soft black sweater with sleeves that came down over her hands. Lou had showered too, in a bathroom the size of her bedroom with a shower that came at you from four directions at once, and was wearing the spare clothes from her gym bag, and her legs were already stiff.
She ate the dumplings first. They were very good. Theo was right.
Morgana ate everything. She went through the cartons one at a time, systematically, trying a little of each, with the same attention Lou had watched her give bread in the van and hot chocolate at the rink. The difference was that now she talked while she did it. She said the orange chicken was too sweet, and then ate more of it. She said she didn't understand why anyone would put pineapple in anything, and then ate the pineapple. She held up a piece of broccoli on her chopsticks and looked at it with such open suspicion that Lou laughed with her mouth full and had to put a hand over it.
"What do you want to watch?" Morgana asked.
"I don't mind," Lou said. "You choose."
"I don't mind either."
Lou looked at her.
"Theo told me to make you choose," she said.
Morgana put down her chopsticks. She looked at Lou with an expression that was entirely and recognisably the face of someone who has been betrayed by her assistant, and Lou laughed again, and this time didn't cover it.
They argued about it for twenty minutes. In the end they settled on something that had come out that week: a series about a disgraced sommelier who inherits a failing vineyard in a valley full of people who hate her, which neither of them had heard of and both of them agreed looked terrible. It was terrible. It was wonderful. They watched three episodes. Morgana got very invested in whether the sommelier would get the harvest in before the rain, and said so out loud, several times, to the television. Lou told her it was obviously going to rain and the whole season would be about the harvest failing. Morgana said she didn't believe that, and Lou said she'd bet her twenty dollars, and Morgana said that was illegal in her house, and Lou didn't know if that was a joke.
Somewhere in the middle of the third episode, Lou put her feet up on the couch. She didn't notice herself doing it. She was eating the last of the noodles out of the carton with her stiff legs stretched out along the velvet and her socks nearly touching Morgana's knee, and the sommelier was standing in the rain in her ruined vineyard, and Lou was already composing what she would say about being right.
She didn't think about it once. Not the van, not the chapel, not the light. She'd been thinking about wine and rain and whether there was any more of the orange chicken.
She woke at some time past one.
The room was dark except for the television, which had been paused on a frame of the valley at dawn, and the candles, most of which had burned down to nothing. Someone had put a blanket over her. It was grey and very soft, and she didn't remember it, and it was tucked in around her feet.
At the other end of the couch, Morgana was asleep.
She'd fallen asleep sitting up, curled into the corner with her knees drawn up and her sleeves over her hands, her head tipped against the back cushion. Her mouth was a little open. In the light from the paused television her face looked very young and completely unguarded, the face of someone who had trained hard and eaten too much and stayed up too late on a Saturday, and had simply run out.
Lou lay there and looked at her.
Beyond her, through the glass, the pool was still lit. It lay out there on the dark terrace among the plants and the dead candles, long and still, glowing that pale blue-green into the night with the city behind it. The light came in through the window and lay across the stone floor and up the side of the couch, and across Morgana's hands where they were curled in her sleeves.
Lou looked at it for a long time.
Then she looked back at the sleeping face, and reached down to the end of the couch, and pulled half of the grey blanket over Morgana's feet too.
The cat would be furious. Lou settled back against the cushions with the blanket up to her chin and decided she would deal with that in the morning.