Читать книгу February's Son - Alan Parks - Страница 18

He’s ordered a tea and a scone. Smiled at the waitress, made some small talk about the bad weather. He can do these things. Shift. Shift what he is, what people think he is. He fingers the pictures in his pocket. Remembered the first time he’d heard about a Polaroid camera. Couldn’t believe it. Meant that finally he could take the kind of pictures he wanted.

He looks round. Treron’s tearoom. Third floor of the department store on Sauchiehall Street. Him and a sea of ladies in hats and gloves. He looks like a dutiful son awaiting his elderly mother, like a loving husband meeting his wife after a day of shopping.

Sometimes he can see it, he thinks, in the half-light, in the gloom of a darkened bedroom, the beam of a torchlight shining in someone’s terrified eyes. What he is. The dried and flaking blood on his hands and clothes. The skull shining through the skin. But when he blinks it goes. What he is.

He can see himself sitting here with her. Her showing him something she’s bought downstairs, him smiling and saying it looks nice. He forces his finger down onto the hard plastic corner of the Polaroid in his pocket, pushes harder until he feels it burst through the skin. Blood on blood.

He stood up, needed to get to Jessops before it closed. Wanted to buy three more packets of film. After all, he was going to need it . . .