Читать книгу Nikki Gemmell’s Threesome: The Bride Stripped Bare, With the Body, I Take You - Nikki Gemmell - Страница 42

a selfish girl’s face often looks sour

Mid-July. A burst of audacious heat. Summer has finally begun and you can feel the exuberance on the streets: people are jumping into the fountain at Trafalgar Square and skipping work to lounge on deckchairs in Hyde Park.

Your mood, wine-dark.

You don’t have, any more, a sanctuary in kindness and good deeds and surrender; you’re changing, you can feel the souring. A thrill plumes through you when couples split, a feeling that order’s restored, that it’s the way we’re all meant to be, alone. You feel a little electric charge when friends lose their jobs or their new magazine’s panned, when a baby’s miscarried or the heavens hurl rain on a wedding day. What have you become? Unhinged, no longer a doormat, just like everyone else?

But something is beginning to unfold within you. An idea: to live less tentatively, more selfishly. You’re intrigued by people who seem foolish and passionate and ridiculous, but alive with all the mess that that entails. You’ve always been too cautious. Too gentle for newsroom journalism, Cole said once, not scary or neurotic enough, thank God.

Trapped by blandness. And fear. And a knowing that it’s easier to instruct than to act.

You wonder about those people who just disappear. Theo had a friend who was stuck in a life she didn’t want and one day she said I’ve just got to pop into Tesco and she left her husband in the car park, and never came out. He waited for three hours before raising the alarm.

You wonder about mining a more dangerous seam of yourself. You’d like to try harder to be beautiful, or at least interesting; beauty is power, your mother’s taught you that. She’d say for God’s sake get rid of those glasses, when you were a teenager, try and make yourself presentable, as if you couldn’t possibly be hers.

You glimpse your first grey hair and twang it out, and then you pluck at the tiny almost invisible hairs on your chin and your belly and feel a thrill as they slide out, feel as if your life, your real life, is perhaps beginning. You have to make it begin, you can’t just give up. Before, life was something that always seemed to happen to other people. Like Theo.