At first, they made a gesture towards asking questions. Sarah had thought some up while she was brushing her teeth and Veronica too seemed to have stockpiled some good ones. They went back and forth: “If you had to kiss one of the male teachers at school, who would it be?” “What do you think is better, your legs, your bum or your boobs? And which is the worst?” “Who do you like best out of your parents?” “Do you wish your family was as rich as mine?” “Have you ever cheated on a test?” “Have you ever masturbated?” For a while they got stuck on ‘To save your family’s life…’ questions: “To save your family’s life, would you… chop off the tip of your finger, or all of your hair? Would you smear your whole body in honey for a day, or for five minutes go in a cage full of spiders? Would you go to school naked, or lay on the floor in the middle of assembly and let everyone in the year wee on you?” They squealed and winced at their own disgustingness, at the grossness of what their imaginations could conjure, and they pretended to weigh each fantasy carefully. But the game was not in truth a test of their loyalty – it quickly became clear that Sarah would do absolutely anything for her family, even for Eliza, and whether Veronica felt this way or not (Sarah suspected she didn’t), it was the line she stuck by, too. No, the test was not of their answers but of the questions, of their stomach for depravity, their repertoire of it, their boldness in speaking it aloud.

Before lunch, however, they ran out of questions, and so returned to dares. They did this as though by accident, but of course it was what they had been building to all along. TCR dictated talk, and so they had humoured each other in a kind of childish foreplay. But the excitement of the dare…

Veronica

George had actually managed to make it home from the office a full hour before Sarah and David were due to arrive and was now upstairs showering. Veronica could hear the slight gurgling of pipes and the creak of bathroom tiles, but otherwise, there was near serenity. In relative terms, the neighbours had been barely audible all week. Typical, Veronica thought, just as she had determined to make Dominic her project. Still, there was a relief to it. Veronica had finally seen the woman on the street, looking nowhere near as oppressed as she had been imagining, and though there remained the daily yobbish sing-along at unsociable hours, and the wrenching taunt of a crying child, there had not been a repeat of those first frightening sounds of aggression. Veronica still felt an irritating stab of anxiety every time she approached the house, but having now seen the man for herself – not exactly a pipsqueak, but certainly no match for George – and having noticed the way he averted his eyes from her own, she found that she was far less nervous than she had been. Veronica felt almost solid in her dinner preparations.