The Girl in the Water. A J Grayson

this truth. It would destroy her. It’s only the lies that keep us alive, and keep us together.

      I’ve struggled with this fact countless times. Since childhood it’s been engrained in all of us that truth is what liberates, and it alone. It will set you free – such a pithy saying, and probably as a general rule it holds true. But not always. No, not always. Sometimes truth is the greatest form of slavery.

      At one point in my life I would have rejected that premise with all my energy – I’d have spat out that lies have absolutely no place in life, that they lead only to darkness and torment. That ought to be argued as a matter of principle. But I simply can’t. I won’t. Experience sometimes proves right what social norms insist are wrong.

      Everything I’ve built with Amber is a lie. I admit that. It’s all facade. That’s what makes it work – for me, for her. A beautiful, artistic, warm facade of manufactured reality. It isn’t true, perhaps. That depends on your definition. But it’s real.

      It’s been real since that day in the Marin Headlands when – for all Amber knows, or ever will – we met for the first time. That happy little headbutt above the sea, the little sidestepping dance that forced the moment not to pass but linger. Some might say the staging of it, the weeks of thoughtful planning, of following her movements and learning her itineraries, of making sure I’d be on just the same path at just the same time, were manipulative or false. But no one accuses a man who plots out a typical first date of being sinister for doing so – deliberating what flowers to buy, what restaurant to go to, what music to ‘accidentally’ have playing on the car stereo during the drive. It’s normal, all of it.

      Is what I’ve done really so different? Only the circumstances are out of the norm, and for damned good reasons.

      And I still have means of rescuing the situation. Tools. Resources. Not everything is lost.

      This is a world I’m not willing to let fall apart.

       11

       Not every den of torture looks like what we’re given to expect. Like what the storybooks tell us we should see there. It is possible that there are those which fit the stereotype: dark, damp stone walls with old chains hanging from hooks on the ceiling, the devices of abuse crusted with dirt and gore.

       It’s possible.

       But reality can be more hellish than those props. Strip away the myth, and what’s left behind – what’s left to be real – is something different. Something worse.

       It’s a basement, though not because there is any particular power to darkness or to being underground. It’s a basement because basements bar sound better than ground-level living rooms, and though there isn’t usually that much noise involved in the way torture really works, one does want to guard against even the remotest possibilities.

      It is furnished nicely, if simply. The carpeting is higher grade than discount, the walls are a muted tan. There are bookshelves with nondescript volumes – the kind that bespeak a degree of education but not an excess of wealth – and a small desk in one corner, with an old tube-style television on a table in another. The chequered fabric sofa with pull-out bed is the centrepiece of the wall to the right, as one enters, and the door itself is wood-panelled with a knockoff brass knob. The prefab sort with a lightly marked up, push-button lock.

       The only sign of the room’s real purpose is the sturdy chrome bolt lock that’s been added above the knob. An ordinary basement den, with no windows or external exits, doesn’t have a deadbolt fitted towards the interior hallway. Especially not the kind that is key operated only, from both sides.

       The kind that, once locked, keeps you in as well as out.

       12

       Amber

      As all days do, the new one that began when the daylight crept over the hills has rolled through its usual routines. It’s brought the sun and home and work, but I haven’t been seeing them in a bright light. This day was inaugurated differently, and as it began, so it carried on.

      Differently.

      I arrived at work at 8.50 a.m. It should have been 8.30 a.m., and I should have been in better cheer, but there’s only so much control one can exercise over the ebbs and flows of life. I was late, grumpy, and had been praying solely for a lack of conversation and an empty path between the front door and my desk.

      That I made it through Classical Fiction and New Releases en route to my periodicals corner, past the coffee kiosk, arriving at my desk without interruption, felt like the first bit of unmitigated good news of the day. My unusual tardiness meant the bookshop was already bustling with customers, and someone else had already gone through the day’s delivery packs, at least enough to get a few copies of the morning papers on the racks in time for the day’s first push. I’d probably end up being scolded for thrusting that role onto someone else by my absence, but I would simply have to face that.

      Mitch had left a cup of tea on my desk, though his office at this moment was empty. I sighed, marginally disappointed with myself for being relieved, but I simply wasn’t in the right frame of mind to have interacted well if he’d been there in his usual cheer. When you’re in a pissy mood the cheerfulness of others is doubly revolting.

      I popped the plastic lid off the Peet’s tea and drew in a long sip, taking advantage of the distraction to avoid the disorder of the boxes around me. The tea was tepid, but it still satisfied. It washed the latent coffee taste from my tongue, and with it a bit of the tension of the morning.

      Then it was onto automatic pilot. Sorting. Shelving. Cutting boxes and recycling. Bringing order to the most changeable corner of the shop. Then, when it was all done, settling into the quiet that invariably followed. Reading the papers. Scanning the glossy magazines. Gold computer, open – the surest sign I was fully caught up despite my late arrival and could settle into the calm of the day. Eventually, a little chime announced that all was well with the technological innards of my laptop and the screen shifted to display the desktop. I called up my usual starting pages: AP, Reuters, The Times. All auto-refreshing to the day’s latest.

      The rhythm of ordinary life in a low-intensity job is a decent tonic for anxiety, and it’s cheaper than Xanax. A comforting montage. This is my morning, I reflected, my every morning. It’s today’s, and it will be tomorrow’s.

       It was yesterday’s.

      I’d stiffened a little at that. The word didn’t feel right in my head. Yesterday. As if it weren’t an actual day.

      Next to my computer, opposite the memos, was a little notepad. I’ve been repeatedly reminded I can take notes on the computer itself, but I suppose I feel the same way about paper and pen as I do about novels with covers and words on actual pages. On the cover of the notepad is a garishly pink Hello Kitty logo, augmented with purples and reds that only a colour-blind teenage girl could admire. I’d grabbed it out of a stationery shop’s discount bin a few weeks back without closely examining what I was buying, and every time I look at it now, it makes me feel ten years old and ridiculous.

      I flipped open the cover.

       Yesterday.

      I tried to cast the word out of mind as I scanned over the few notes I’d written. They were all various jottings about that headline. Yesterday’s headline. The story that had so enrapt me.

       Woman.

      The shiver, again.

       Thirty-nine.

       White.