Читать книгу Perfect - Cecelia Ahern, Cecelia Ahern - Страница 13

“What?” says Granddad.

“You heard me.”

On top of me is the white sheet. Above it, firewood and moss. Suddenly, something shifts and the sheet that has been rucked up, giving me space to breathe, collapses to my skin. I try to blow it away but I can’t move it. And now Mary May wants to set me on fire. She knows I’m here. I’m the mouse caught in the trap.

Granddad tries to talk her out of it. He wasn’t intending on lighting it quite yet. The food isn’t ready; it needs to be wrapped up. It will all take time. She tells him she has time. She tells Dahy to prepare the food, but she doesn’t care about the food: she is more intent on setting me alight. She tells Granddad to concentrate on the fire. She’s not asking him – she’s telling him. She knows there’s nobody on this farm to share the food other than a bunch of Flawed, and she has no respect for their plans.

It’s happening now.

I feel another bundle land on my legs. Granddad is taking his time, chatting, dilly-dallying, doing his old-man-persona trick.

“Put one there,” she says.

It lands on my chest.

I can’t breathe. I can’t breathe. I close my eyes, try to return to the yacht. My eighteenth birthday, the chocolate fondue, the music, the breeze, the person I should be, not the person I am. I try to go far away, but I can’t disappear. I’m here and now. The logs are heavy on my body; the air is close.

Mary May wants him to hurry. If I’m discovered, then Granddad will be punished too. I take deep breaths, not wanting my chest to visibly rise and fall beneath the sheet and logs.

“I have a lighter,” Mary May says.

Granddad laughs at that. A big hearty boom. “Well, that won’t do. My tools are in the barn. You stay here with Dahy, watch how he prepares the food. I’ll be back.”

It’s the way he says it. So untrustworthy, it’s obvious that he’s lying. He’s so clever. She thinks he’s trying to get away from her, that there’s something or someone in the barn that he needs to hide from her. He’s so insistent on her staying here with Dahy that, of course, her attention leaves the pit and she insists on going to the barn with him. Dahy can help me out of here, lift some of the wood off.

But of course she then contacts her fellow Whistleblowers and tells them to accompany Dahy, to help him gather all the Flawed workers and line them up at the cooking pit.

She’s going to burn me out for everyone to see.