The Trap Read Free Page A

monochrome.
    Oh damn, the flowers! Thinking of the flowers catapults me back to the present. I sit up in bed. I forgot to ask Charlotte to water the flowers in the conservatory, and she’ll have left by now. Charlotte knows how much I love my flowers and she knows I usually look after them myself, so it’s unlikely she’ll have given them water. There’s nothing for it but to do it myself.
    I get up, groaning. The floor is cool beneath my bare feet. I force myself to place one foot in front of the other, to walk along the hallway towards the stairs, go down to the ground floor, and cross the big sitting room and the dining room. I open the door to my conservatory and enter the jungle.
    My house is dominated by empty spaces and dead objects—not counting Bukowski. But here in my conservatory, with its lush and rampant greenery, it’s life that reigns. Palms, ferns, passionflowers, birds of paradise, flamingo flowers and, above all, orchids. I love exotic plants.
    The steamy heat of the conservatory, which I think of as my own little hothouse, brings out the sweat on my forehead almost immediately, and the long baggy T-shirt I wear as a nightie clings to me. I love this green jungle. I don’t want orderliness; I want chaos, life. I want the twigs and leaves to brush against me as if I were in a forest. I want to smell the scent of the flowers; I want to get drunk on it. I want to soak up the colours.
    I look about me. I know that the sight of my plants should give me pleasure, but today I feel nothing. My conservatory is brightly lit, but outside it is night. Indifferent stars twinkle through the glass roof above my head. As if on autopilot, I carry out the tasks that usually give me so much satisfaction. I water the flowers. I touch the soil with my fingers, feeling if it’s dry and crumbly and needs water, or clings to my hands.
    I clear a path for myself to the back of the greenhouse. This is where I have my own private orchid garden. The plants with their extravagant blooms are crammed onto shelves, or hang in pots from the ceiling. My favourite is here—my favourite and my problem child. It’s a small orchid, altogether unassuming alongside its lavishly flowering sisters, and almost ugly. It has only two or three dull, dark-green leaves and dry grey roots, no flowers, not for a long time now, not so much as a stalk. It’s the only plant I didn’t buy especially for the conservatory. I brought it with me from my old life, from the real world, many, many years ago. I know that it will never flower, but I can’t bring myself to get rid of it. I give it some water. Then I turn my attention to a particularly beautiful orchid with heavy white flowers. I let my hand glide over the leaves, finger its velvety flowers. The buds are firm to the touch. They are bursting with life. Not long now until they come out. I think how nice it would be to cut a few of these flowering stems and put them in a vase in the house. And, while I’m thinking all this, I’m reminded of Anna again. Even in here, I can’t get her out of my head.
    When we were little, she didn’t like picking flowers as much as I did, or as much as the other children. She thought it was mean to break off their beautiful heads. A smile steals over my lips as I think of it now. Anna’s quirks. I see my sister before me quite clearly—her blonde hair, her cornflower-blue eyes, her tiny nose, her enormous mouth, the furrow between her pale eyebrows that would appear whenever she got cross. The small moles that formed a perfect triangle on her left cheek. The blonde down only visible if the summer sun lit up her face at the right angle. I see her quite plainly. And I hear her voice, clear as a bell, and her dirty, boyish laugh that contrasted so starkly with her feminine nature. I see her before me, laughing, and it’s like being punched in the stomach.
    I think back to one of the first sessions with my therapist, shortly after Anna’s death. The police had