Читать книгу Last Light - Alex Scarrow - Страница 10

8.31 a.m. GMT University of East Anglia (UEA), Norwich

Leona stirred, slowly waking by inches. And then still half-asleep, she remembered who was sharing her bed. She shuddered with a smug, secret pleasure, as if she were holding a million pound prize-winning lottery ticket but had yet to tell anyone.

Danny moved sleepily in the bed next to her. She sat up and looked down at him. He was breathing evenly and deeply, still very much lost in the land of slumber, a content half-smile spread across his lips.

Daniel Boynan.

He looked even more lovely with his eyes closed, his lips pursed, and not pulling any stupid faces to make her laugh. Totally angelic. His mop of dark hair was piled around him on the pillow, and his dark eyebrows momentarily knit as his mind randomly skipped through a dream. Leona had spotted him on the first day, registration day, queuing like her to get his Student Union card and his campus ID.

Donnie Darko, she thought. That’s who he had reminded her of.

And throughout most of the first term Leona had pursued him, discreetly of course. Never appearing too interested, though, just enough that he got the message, eventually.

God, boys can be so flippin’ blind - he hadn’t noticed Leona had been eyeing him up for the last eight weeks.

And then it sort of happened last night. What should have been Step Five of her Ten Step Plan to conquer the heart of Dan Boynan, had turned into a rapid tiptoe through Six, Seven, Eight, Nine . . .

And Step Ten had been just about perfect.

She watched him breathe easily, and pushed a lock of hair away from his porcelain face. Here he was, Daniel, gorgeous normally - doubly-so asleep. A brass ankh pendant, dangled down from his neck, the fine leather thong draped over his collar-bone, the small looped cross nestled in a hollow at the base of his throat. That’s what she liked about him - with any other lad, that would have been a big chunk of bling on a thick silver chain.

Outside her room, she could hear the others stirring in the kitchen. The dinky little portable TV was on, and she could hear the tinkle of spoons on mugs as someone was making a brew.

Beside her, the radio alarm clock switched on quietly and she heard the nattering, way-too-cheerful voice of Larry Ferdinand bantering with one of his studio sidekicks. Leona smiled, Mum listened to him too. If you asked Mum, she would swear blind that it was her who turned on to him first, and then got Leona listening to him, which was, of course, rubbish.

She turned the volume down slightly, not wanting Daniel to be woken up, well, not yet anyway, and then slid gently out of bed. She picked up Daniel’s burgundy coloured FCUK hoodie, discarded by the side of the bed, and slipped it on. It was so big on her, it hung down almost to her knees.

Daniel said he loved her Kiwi accent. Leona didn’t think she had even a trace of Dad’s clipped vowels. For the most part she thought she sounded like everyone else: same ol’ Home Counties’ blandness. But there you go.

It was odd though, it’s not like she had been particularly close to Dad, not for the last four or five years, anyway. In fact, she hardly ever saw him. He was always either off on some contract abroad, or distracted with some freelance work in his study. But perhaps from earlier years, when he’d had the time for her and Mum and Jake, that’s where the faint echo of his New Zealand accent had been picked up.

Still who cares, Danny loves it. Bonus.

On the radio she heard Larry Ferdinand hand over to the newsreader.

Daniel stirred in his sleep, mumbling something that sounded like ‘take my other d-d-dog . . .’

He had the slightest stutter, just very slight. Leona found it charming. It made him seem just a little vulnerable, and when he was cracking a joke, somehow that little hitch in his delivery seemed to make the punch line that much more amusing.

She smiled as she looked down at him. Love seemed too strong a word right now - way too early to be throwing around a word like that. But she certainly felt she was more than just in lust with him. And sure as hell she wasn’t going to let Daniel in on that little secret.

Play it cool, Lee.

Yup, that was what she was going to do, especially after she had let him get his cookies last night.

‘. . . now this could mean a very serious shortfall in oil supplies . . .’

Leona cocked her head and listened to the faint voice coming from the radio.

‘. . . if the situation is allowed to get much worse. As it is, it’s early days, and it’s unclear exactly what has happened over there. But this much is certain: it will have an immediate knock-on effect on oil prices . . .’

She sighed. Oil . . . terrorists . . . bombs - that’s all news seemed to be these days; angry mobs, guns being fired into the sky, faces full of hatred. The news reminded her of the tired old doom ’n’ gloom Dad tended to spout after a glass or two of red wine.

‘It’ll happen quickly when it happens . . . one thing after another, going down like dominoes. And no one will be ready for it, not even us, and Christ, we’re in the minority that know about it . . .’

Shit. Dad could be really wearing when he got going on his pet hobby-horse; rattling on about stuff like Hubbert’s Peak, petro-dollars, hydrocarbon footprints . . . it was his special party piece, the thing he talked about when he couldn’t think of anything else interesting to say. Which, to be honest, was most of the time. God, he just wouldn’t shut up about it when he got going, especially when he thought he had an interested audience.

Leona reached over and snapped the radio off.

She knew Mum was getting to the point where she’d had enough, to put it bluntly; she wondered if Mum was getting bored of Dad. She could feel something brewing at home, there was an atmosphere. Leona was just glad to be away at uni, and glad her little brother, Jacob, was at his prep school. It gave her parents some room and an opportunity to sort out whatever they needed to sort out.

She padded lightly across the floor of her room, stepping over the trail of clothes both she and Daniel had shed behind them as they’d worked their way briskly from first base to last, the night before.

She opened the door of her room and headed into the kitchen where a pile of pots, plates and pans encrusted with beans and ravioli were waiting in vain to be washed up, and a couple of her campus floor-mates were watching Big Brother Live through a haze of cigarette smoke on the TV nestled in the space above the fridge.