8

She walks slowly up the creaking, moonlit wooden stairs. As if she's trying to delay the moment when she reaches her apartment door. She's horribly aware that in the very near future, she'll have to deliver a credible performance. She'll have to seem like a woman who's just been through a horrible ordeal, and wants to forget all about it.

She isn't sure if she can.

Her heart's racing. She feels dizzy, unreal, feverish with wonderment.

She feels fully alive as she hasn't done in years. Maybe ever.

Her key turns in the lock, and she steps into the apartment.

She walks through the hallway as quietly as she can. She glances through the half-open living room door. Rick's asleep in an armchair. There's a half-empty whisky glass on the carpet beside him.

She realises that, when he got in from wherever he's been tonight, he intended to stay up for her return. But he drunk too much to stay awake – or maybe he was just tired. The latter, maybe. The clock across the room says it's two in the morning.

Relief hits her hard.

And she's tiptoeing past, towards the bedroom, when she steps on a creaky floorboard and he wakes up. He awakens like a man who's found himself in five feet of water, all panicky flailing and sudden disorientation.

'Lizzie.' She can see him fully surfacing from sleep as he speaks. He rubs his eyes. 'Jesus, what time is it?'

She pauses in the living room doorway, and looks in at him.

'It's just gone two.' She keeps her voice neutral, expressionless. 'I'm going to bed.'

As he looks back at her, she can see his confusion and disorientation. She can see him wondering whether to ask her any questions about what happened tonight. She can see him wondering whether he really wants to know. She can see him wondering whether she really wants to tell him. She's suddenly worried about what he's seeing. She struggles to keep her face blank, but she's not sure she can hide her fever-bright eyes and the flush on her cheeks. She's about to hurry onwards to the bedroom when he speaks unexpectedly.

'I've never seen that dress before.'

'It's been in the wardrobe for days. Aunt Marie bought it for me when I met her last.'

She's taken a single step towards the bedroom, when his voice – disbelieving, aghast - freezes her in her tracks.

'The hell is that?'

'The hell is what?' she asks, but her heart's plummeting inside her, and she knows.

'That thing around your neck is what. He gave that to you?'

Suddenly, she feels more weary than anything else. She just wants to go to bed and sleep and sleep and leave all this till the morning. At the same time, she knows she needs to tell him. She walks into the living room, and sits down on one faded green brocade armchair. The light in here's sad and frail, a single too-dim lamp burning between them. After the mega scale of Arnold Rothstein's estate, the small cluttered room seems weirdly tiny, too tiny for human beings to live in at all easily. Claustrophobia stuffs her throat with cotton wool. The chair she's sitting in seems hard and uncomfortable as it never really has done before.

She takes a long deep breath, and forces herself to speak.

'What you said before - how this might not be the last time. You were right. He said so. He says if I don't keep on seeing him when he likes, he'll call in your debt. I'm sorry.'

She doesn't even know how she should be sounding. That's the hell of it. She's heard of stage actors asking what's my motivation in this scene. She can understand why, because she simply doesn't know how to act right now. Whether she should seem traumatised or philosophical or scared or furious. She settles for speaking in a quiet toneless voice, not quite meeting his eyes,

'That's why he gave me this.' She indicates the necklace she's wearing. 'He wants me to wear it. All the time. A token of his, his, I don't know...'

'Affection?' The word comes out bitter enough to burn. 'Yeah sure, like he gives a damn about you or anyone else. He just likes fucking people's lives up, end of story. We've just got to sit tight and bide our time here, Lizzie - it won't last. He'll get bored, move on. Forget about the whole thing. Hell, we can sell that thing when he's moved on to the next little game - maybe take it to Goldman's round the corner, see what he'll give us for it, and –'

It's as if all her own secret, insidious terrors have come to life, and are speaking to her - taunting her in this room that's so much smaller and sadder and less welcoming than she ever imagined before – and it momentarily enrages her. She forgets where she is, who she's with, how she's meant to be feeling. She speaks far too fiercely.

'The hell do you know what he thinks and doesn't think? You think you know anything about him?'

She takes a long deep shuddering breath. When she speaks again, her voice is tense with suppressed fury.

'And I'm not selling it. If you think I'll ever sell it, you can go to hell.'

And she's said too much somehow, she realises in the silence that follows, she's only spoken a few sentences, but she's said far too much. The slowly dawning look on his face hurts her heart. Disbelief. Bewilderment. Betrayal. As if he's just looked round, and seen that his most trusted supporter's crossed over to the enemy camp.

He looks at her for a long, long time. As if he's seeing aspects of her appearance and demeanour tonight for the very first time. Finally, she just can't stand it any more.

'Don't look at me like that,' she says quietly.

'How am I supposed to look at you? You look like – Jesus, I don't know what you look like.' He hesitates for a second, then plunges on. 'You look like you've been having the time of your life.'

Another too-long pause. She can feel the tension gathering in around them.

'This is getting too fucked up, Lizzie,' he says tonelessly. 'I don't know how to handle it.'

'You don't know how to handle it? You left me to handle it, remember?'

She can feel her overpowering guilt catching fire inside her. Blazing into anger with terrifying speed, and then into fury. A fury that's cold this time, cold and precise and deliberate. Slowing her speech instead of quickening it. Making every word come out slow and perfectly enunciated, edged with purest ice.

'You started this. You started all of this. Don't you dare try and make me feel bad.'

He looks at her. She looks back. For a second, a fleeting second, it's as if she sees him through the eyes of another woman completely. A coldly observant stranger who sees his dirty, rumpled clothes and his faint smell of whisky and his hapless helpless bewildered air.

The stranger sees a buffoon. A failure. A joke.

The stranger thinks that he's a pathetic thing. Perhaps he always has been.

And then she's looking at him through her own eyes again, and she's utterly terrified, because he's just as he's always been, he's Rick, he's the man she loves and always has done, and she doesn't know what the hell just happened.

'I'm going to bed,' she says quietly.

She walks into the bedroom, and sits down on the edge of the bed.

Her hands go to the clasp at the back of the necklace. Unfastening it with the utmost care.

She closes her eyes and hears Arnold Rothstein's voice, deep down in her mind.

He says to be used when and as I please.

Despite the warmth of the summer night, she shivers.