Читать книгу Marilyn’s Child - Lynne Pemberton - Страница 7

When I was fifteen I knew how it felt to want someone. I mean really want them in every sense of the word. It happened very quickly, in a flash of absolute clarity, and it made the most perfect sense. There are moments, I’m sure, in everyone’s life, when absolute certainty stifles reasonable doubt. So it was with me. Of course he, the object of my adolescent longing, wasn’t of like mind – well, not then, not in the beginning. His moment of truth would come later, much later.

The past is a place I visit often – too often. It’s an unhealthy pastime, the retreat of the old and the dying who have nowhere else to go. I’m young, so why do I keep returning? Wallowing in it, embracing it? I even have to admit enjoying the pain. What use recrimination? What use regret? Had his thoughts been of me when he chose to leave? Had he wondered what would become of me without him? I’ve tried to patch it up, my broken heart that is, but I’m still searching for the right dressing, so I continue to bleed. In my head I can hear his voice, it never goes away; the deep resonant music of memory plays over and over again in the dark corners of my mind. ‘Our childhood baggage is merely pawned, to be retrieved or returned to us later in life, in one guise or another … There is no escape, Kate, nothing is ever what it seems.’

I close my eyes, my thoughts racing, my heart pumping hard. I’m travelling back, and the sensation is akin to a fast ride on an express train. The landscape of my life flashes past so quick I have no time to take any of it in. I can feel his presence, he’s close, very close, closer than he’s been for a long time. He looks exactly the way he’d looked the first time I set eyes on him, at precisely ten past four on a wet afternoon in March 1978.