“I knew it was a risk. Rik spelled it out really carefully—I wouldn’t see my money back for a long time, and if the firm went under, I’d lose everything. But Topher—you don’t know what he’s like. He’s so charismatic. He makes you feel that you’re everything, that he will take care of you, that your money could not be in safer hands. So that’s what I went for in the end. I thought at the time that Topher was being generous. I thought he was looking out for me.” I stare into the flames, feeling the brightness burning into my retinas, as if it can burn away the memories I have carried with me for years. “I didn’t know then what I know now—that he had seen how it would pan out in the event of a disagreement, and thought I was someone he could pressure in the event of a split.”
I stop. Suddenly this feels hard in a way I didn’t think it would. It is good to spill all of this. Erin is a good listener in some ways, and it feels a little like lancing a boil—letting out all the poison that has festered away since that night. But it hurts too. And when I swallow against the pain, my throat is dry. The sensation gives me an idea.
“Shall I make some tea?” I ask.
“Sorry?” Erin says. There is an incredulous note in her voice. I can’t quite blame her—the question must have sounded slightly surreal in the midst of all this.
“Tea,” I say. “I don’t know about you, but I’m really thirsty.”
“Tea?” Erin echoes, like someone speaking in a foreign language, and then she gives a shaky laugh. “Tea… would actually be great. It’s exactly what I need right now.”
We get up and limp together into the kitchen, where I find two cups, and Erin fetches the stovetop kettle and a packet of tea bags.
“There’s no milk I’m afraid,” she says as she puts the kettle under the tap. “It went off yesterday.”
We both stand there, waiting for the kettle to fill, but there is no sound of rushing water. And then I remember. I can see from the sudden look of comprehension on Erin’s face that she has remembered too.
“The pipes,” she says unnecessarily. I nod.
“Should we get snow?” I ask.
“I… guess?” Erin says, but I can hear from the hesitation in her voice that she doesn’t want to go outside. I can’t say I exactly blame her. I don’t really want to go out either. We both know that stepping outside the chalet would give the other person the chance to lock us out, where we would very likely freeze to death. But the snow is piled up against the front door, so if we do this right, neither of us needs to go outside.
“If you open the front door,” I say, “and stand there with the kettle, I can chip bits off the drift by the door.”
She nods, and I can see from her expression that she is grateful that I have taken on the more precarious role. The snow is piled up so high that you have to climb over the drift to get out, so it’s fairly unlikely someone could just push you out of the door, but it is still possible.
“Thanks,” she says, and together we troop through into the foyer, where Erin unlocks the bowing front door. I begin to dig at the hard-packed snow with a spoon, chipping off lumps, and putting them into the kettle Erin is holding out. At last we are both shivering with cold, but the kettle is full, and we shut the door and return to the living room, and the blazing fire, where Erin balances the kettle on the edge of the woodstove, and we both warm up our hands at the glass.
“You were saying,” she prompts, as the kettle begins to hiss and sigh. “The shares?” Her words bring me back with a bump to our present reality. I finger the empty packet of sleeping pills in my pocket. I think about what I have to do.
ERIN
Snoop ID: LITTLEMY
Listening to: Offline
Snoopers: 5
Snoopscribers: 10
Finding the kettle, getting the snow, all the little mundane practicalities of making the tea have let me push our situation to the back of my mind for a moment, but as the silence closes around us, I feel fear settle like a weight on the back of my neck. Liz is silent, her face blank and unreadable, her hands stuck out to the blaze, and somehow her silence is more terrifying than any speech. I find myself trying to work out what is going through her mind—is she figuring a way out of this? Or just thinking about what she has done?
The kettle hisses softly. Liz just sits there, staring at the kettle, one hand held out the blaze, the other in her pocket, and suddenly I can’t take it anymore.
“You were saying?” I blurt out.
Liz looks up. She looks at me appraisingly, in a way I don’t like. She is crunching a piece of plastic in her pocket. The noise is loud in the silence and I think if she doesn’t say something, I might scream.
And then she swallows and picks up her story again.
“The shares. Yes. So yes, there I am, twenty-two, a shareholder in this up-and-coming app—and Topher and Eva start treating me a bit more like a human being, now that I’m invested in the business. I mean, I’ve only got two percent. Even Elliot and Rik dwarf my share. But I am a shareholder. And one night, a few days after we signed the papers, there’s this drinks party in this flashy London bar—I can’t remember why, I think they were after a partnership with some streaming company, some kind of quid pro quo.”
She stops. Something is coming, I can tell. I don’t know what exactly, but it feels like Liz is gearing herself up for something, forcing herself on to a part of the story she doesn’t want to spell out.
“They had an argument, over whether I should go. I remember Rik saying, Do you think this is the image we want to project? He didn’t know I was listening, of course. They were in Eva’s office, and I was listening in via the intercom. And Eva said, For fuck’s sake, Rik, it’s not rocket science, I can make her presentable. And she’s one of us on paper now, thanks to Toph, so she might as well look the part. Then she paused and said, Besides, Norland likes her type. He likes them young. So I knew what was going on when Eva got me to come over to her house before the party and offered to lend me a dress, because she knew I was on a budget after pouring all my money into Snoop. When she said it like that it sounded perfectly reasonable, kind, even, but I knew the truth.
“Well, you’ve seen Eva. You know what she’s like. There’s probably only about three women in London who could squeeze into her jeans. But we found something, somehow, and Eva made up my face, and when we arrived at the bar and were introduced to the executives from the other company—I don’t know—I actually started to feel like a real Snooper. Eva introduced me not as her PA but as Liz, who is a minority shareholder, and they talked to me with respect, and as the evening wore on I really started to believe this was it—this was the life I had been waiting for. I don’t normally drink much, but I drank that night. I drank a lot—a lot of cocktails, and—”
She stops. The kettle is hissing and bubbling, and she picks it up gingerly by the handle and fills each of the cups, then drops a tea bag in the top.
I take the one she hands to me, looking down into it surreptitiously. I don’t want to aggravate her suspicions, but given how Elliot died, it would be stupid of me not to check. The melted snow is a little cloudy, and the tea is starting to leach out of the bag and color the hot water, but I can still see the bottom of the cup and there’s definitely nothing there. No pills, anyway.