Читать книгу Normal: The Most Original Thriller Of The Year - Graeme Cameron, Graeme Cameron - Страница 9

CHAPTER FOUR

The self-confident bounce was long gone. Erica didn’t move as I balanced the dinner tray in one hand and removed the padlock with the other. The sound of the key in the door, however, had her bolt upright and scrabbling backward across the rubber floor until her back thumped hard against the far side of the cage. She pulled her knees to her chin and glared up at me, wide eyes blazing with venom and fear, the tight, glowing curls of her hair now a matted, lifeless mess that covered her face and clung to the tears as they streamed across her cheeks. Silently, she trembled.

“Erica,” I said softly. “It’s dinnertime.” I placed the tray carefully on the edge of the bed. A wooden tray, decorated with piglets and ducklings, with a built-in knee cushion filled with tiny beans. A plastic plate, dishwasher friendly, with a daisy-chain print around the rim. A matching tumbler filled with ice-cold Highland Spring. Still, not sparkling. Plastic knife and fork.

She neither moved nor spoke; just stared, knees shuddering, shoulders heaving with each shallow breath.

I joined her on the floor, sat facing her. “Come on, you need to eat something besides cereal. You’re looking thin.” No response. “It’s tasty. Try a bit, see if you like it?” Nothing. “Erica, listen to me. I’m not going to let you starve to death here.”

I could sense a change in her then, though she gave no visible sign. I felt her desire to answer me back, to demand to know exactly what she would be dying of. But she still said nothing.

“Okay.” I sighed. “I’ll leave you alone. Do your best.” I pulled myself back up, turned to leave the cage. “Oh, and the sheets on that bed are brand-new.” I swung the door shut, turned the key on both bolts, reached down by my feet for the padlock. “You don’t have to keep sleeping on the floor.”

And then I took a full serving of orange sauce and green beans square in the face.

“I’m not eating fucking meat, you psycho freak!” Erica screamed, grabbing handfuls of steel mesh as the offending fillet plopped to the floor. The plate rolled the length of the cage and clattered against the toilet. Potatoes bounced in all directions. Sauce ran from my hair. I kicked myself.

“Good shot,” I conceded, “but honestly, you’re not in a position to pick and choose.”

“No, you’re right,” she spat, gripping the mesh, her knuckles white, eyes flashing like those of a cornered tiger. “Which reminds me, how long are you going to keep me in this fucking dungeon?”

A reasonable question, and one to which I wished I knew the answer. The simple fact is that time, tendency and tourism are fickle bedfellows, and one can rarely predict when they might deign to coincide. Probably best not to tell her that, though, so I tried to look halfway confident as I asked, “How long’s a piece of string?”

She pushed herself from the door, backed away with a half skip. “Well,” she said, smiling, “you’re hardly going to keep me here for the next eighty years, and you already said I’m not allowed to starve to death, so either you’re holding me to ransom or you’re just going to kill me. Either way, I guess you’ll want to get it over with fairly soon.”

I returned her mocking grin. “Well,” I said, “I’m certainly not intending to sell you.” Her spark retreated. “And I’m sorry to keep you waiting, but I simply haven’t had the opportunity to do anything with you yet. At some point, I’ll take you out, and we’ll play some games, and if you’re lucky, maybe you’ll get to go home. But if you’re too weak to run, you won’t stand a chance, and if you starve, it won’t be any fun for either of us.”

Silence revisited her forthwith. The defiance, the loathing, even the fear vanished from her eyes, leaving only great dark pools of sorrow.

“So, you’ll get what you’re given, and it’ll be good for you, and you’ll eat it, so perhaps you’d like to salvage what you can while I go and find you a mop.”

Fucking vegetarians.

* * *

I didn’t really know what I needed, but I figured I’d make a run for the supermarket on the near side of town. February’s snow was gone, but the onset of spring had been lazy and as darkness fell, the temperature dropped below freezing, the remains of a misty evening turning the roads to ice.

Had the gritters laid any grit, this would have been an easy five-minute drive. As it was, however, I faced an invigorating struggle against the renegade forces of physics. With friction an early casualty, the van slithered maniacally about the rink, seemingly intent on meeting its fate belly-up in a frozen trench. The rush hour had barely ended, but I didn’t pass a single car; no one else was stupid enough to take on the elements out here. I couldn’t help thinking that were I to come to grief, spring would arrive before help did. I liked it.

After twenty-three minutes of sheer exhilarating uncertainty, I reached the motorway. Coated with a layer of brine, and bustling with weary souls packed into grubby tin cans, it brought me crashing back down to the dreariness of everyday life. I felt like a tuna.

Quietly wondering whether vegetarians ate tuna, I followed the usual shopping routine. In the magazine section, I browsed gawky uniformed schoolgirls with braces on their teeth. A petite brunette in a pinstriped suit leafed through the local paper, the familiar headline barely raising an eyebrow. Missing Girls Almost Certainly Abducted. The greeting card aisle was brimming with fat-bottomed mothers ignoring their bored, fidgeting offspring in favor of tired punchlines and nauseating sentiment. Women’s Clothing: deserted but for the fragile, gray-haired fitting room attendant, fixing the floor with the sorrowful gaze of the undervalued, desperate to believe that there might—nay, must be more to life.

In Fruit & Veg I selected a peach. Small, rosy and perfectly rounded, she set my mouth watering the moment she caught my eye. Her burly, bruised companion, however, swiftly killed my appetite. Or rather, his uniform did.

There were no sweet cupcakes to be found in the bakery aisle, just an abundance of greasy doughnuts. In fact, I was struck by how few of those loading up on golden syrup cakes and Danish pastries looked like they could really be trusted with them. Unlike the redhead in the pet-food aisle with the wide hips and the skinny arms, none of these creatures could claim to be big-boned. Considering all implications, I moved on.

Pasta and Sauces: a towering blonde with a hook nose and bandy legs which, under cursory inspection, seemed too thin to support the weight of her body or offer any stability in the face of prevailing winds. She walked in a disjointed manner, which made it difficult to judge between prosthetic and anorexic; either way, I prefer a little meat with my spaghetti.

Things began to look up in the frozen food section: another redhead, younger and narrower this time and more auburn than ginger, in tight jeans that showed off the delicious curve of her slender thighs and rounded hips. I leaned past her to peer into the chiller, barely brushing her ponytail with my cheek. Tea tree and mint and an underlying hint of vanilla. All at once invigorating and relaxing. “Excuse me,” I said, gently laying an apologetic hand on her arm as I reached around to grab a tub of coconut Carte D’Or. She glanced at me and offered a polite smile, made no attempt to move away. Not wishing to push my luck, however, I returned the smile and backed off. I lingered over the frozen vegetables, waited for her to close the chiller and pass by before following at a half-aisle distance, carefully matching my pace to hers.

She was pushing a trolley-for-one, but this was clearly a weekly shop; meal-wise she had the makings of seven single servings and was now selecting an eight-pot pack of fromage frais. She clearly let her hair down one night a week.

She’d already covered most of the store: baked beans, tuna, sweetcorn, tinned cat food, Fairy Liquid, pasta and rice and couscous and a couple of cook-in sauces. The items seemed largely to follow a pattern. Perhaps these were things vegetarians ate.

Her allure all but overshadowed by the sudden wisdom she’d bestowed upon me, and knowing now what needed to be done, I released the redhead from the clutches of my intent and set off on a vital quest to reclaim the moral high ground and secure my reputation as an impeccable host.

I made it as far as the fish counter.

It’s a rare and fortunate man who can pinpoint precisely the moment his life began to unravel. Most can only guess, grasping at distant memories of wealth and security and happiness and wondering just where the hell it all went while they scrape their attempts at independence off the bottom of the oven. Yesterday it was a detached cottage with creeping ivy, a pretty and talented wife who was never too tired and kids who tidied their rooms and kept their elbows off the table. A retriever. A study. A Volvo. Today, a rented one-bed cesspit with grease stains on the ceiling. A portable TV. A Metro. Fleas. The decline, though outwardly long and tortuous, passes in the blink of an eye.

For these people there is no time stamp; their fall from grace occurred over months and years, but still they search the depths of their souls for a date and time in the vain belief that a single moment revisited might serve to reverse their fortunes. Often, they search for the rest of their lives.

I, on the other hand, am one of the lucky ones. I know exactly when it all started to go wrong for me. It was April 5 at 19:23:17, and it started with a pair of eyes.

Most of the eyes I see stare right through me. Some linger on the pavement, desperate to avoid meeting other eyes. Others gaze into the middle distance, vacant and expressionless, betraying a desire to be somewhere, anywhere other than here and now. Some eyes flicker and glaze over and roll back and just stare at nothing at all. But most eyes stare through me as if I’m simply not here.

These eyes, though, these eyes were different. They met my own, bored through them, stared right into me. They carried a charge of some intangible recognition, a magnetic déjà vu trailing its spidery fingers down my spine, throwing sparks of invitation and longing tinged with fear and denial, rendering me at once both intoxicated and drained. My train of thought derailed; my empty head floated free of my shoulders, legs threatening to buckle under the weight of my directionless body. I don’t know how long this electrifying gaze held my own, nor how these eyes came to be mere inches from mine, but sometime later, they blinked and released me from their spell.

My head snapped back into sharp focus. The rancid stench of cockles and mussels headed straight for the back of my throat, giving me the insufferable task of appearing not to gag. Arched eyebrows and a flickering smile told me I’d failed and, for the first time since childhood, I felt the onset of a blush. Frankly, I didn’t know where to look—but I settled on her chest, where I found comfort and understanding in four neatly printed words.

Her name, apparently, was Caroline. And she was Here To Help.