Читать книгу Twice The Speed of Dark - Lulu Allison - Страница 16

Anna wakes, slumped in the corner, feeling as though her bones have been turned upside down. A badly fitting skeleton. She is confused, then thinks, with the horror of fresh news, that Caitlin is dead. The thought batters her, and she panics. Slowly she realises that she has known this for ten years. She wrangles the misery back into the soles of her feet, or the points of her elbows. Back to the place to which it had been banished. All the lights in the house are still on, it is dark outside, and the curtains are open. She feels so very exposed. She eases herself awkwardly up from the floor, the house warm but no longer warm enough. She closes the curtains against the black slides of night. She pulls a warm shawl around her aching shoulders, sinks into the sofa. What is she to do?

She is to do what she always does. She is to wind down and banish, hide within her the ragged wreck of her true self. So she gets up, runs a hot bath. She forces the dullness of the regime back into command. She soaks away the physical pain with hot water and ibuprofen. She sets her jaw. It is early enough to call night-time, late enough to be a new day. The bath is refilled with hot water several times. Even in this unhappy state, she relishes the delicious curl of heat from the new water. It pacifies, aids the process of restoration. She reminds herself that the only thing new is that she has seen that man, she has seen Ryan. She knew, had known, that in theory it was possible, but she never allowed herself close enough to make preparations. Knowing, incontrovertibly, that he was free was devastating. It destroyed a decade of heavily constructed strategies, rough-hewn and massy, relentlessly applied. When the strategies fell, they tore her open. And in the middle she found the thing she could not hide, the thing she thought that, against the odds, she had hidden – the absence of her girl. Still, she does not want to see that tenderness, the obscene, unviable frailty, tender as a featherless baby bird on a pavement.