Читать книгу She’s Not There - Tamsin Grey - Страница 26

Jonah was Slygon, and Raff was Baby Nail. Jonah kept winning, but Raff started getting fed up, so he let him win a few. He kept an eye on the clock, and when it got to 9 p.m. he said it was bedtime.

‘That’s not fair, I haven’t won hardly any yet!’ Raff threw his nunchuck down and went and lay on the sofa, face down.

Jonah stared down at Raff’s back. Then he scrunched his eyes tight shut, to pray, or to make a wish, or to try and reach her, somehow. Please come back. He said it over and over in his head, but the only answer was the Slingsmen tune. His stomach lurched at the endless emptiness of everything, and he tried to get a sense of a god, watching him: Ganesha, with his kind little elephant eye, or the Christian god, his bearded face all cloudy. Or maybe a group of gods in their togas? Was what was happening a kind of test? If he did the right thing, would he get her back? And was she up there, with the gods, was she waiting for him to work it out, to pass the test, so that she could return; holding her breath, wanting to shout clues to him?

The Slingsmen tune tinkled on and on, with the occasional phwoof of a released missile. He opened his eyes, dropped his nunchuck, and pulled her phone out of his pocket. The smallness of it, the lightness, the scratched redness, the way it flipped open and closed: so familiar, it was like an actual part of her. He flipped it open and looked at the text from Sunday morning.

Tonight X

He glanced down at Raff, and walked out of the room.

In the kitchen he pressed the green call button and held the phone to his ear. As it rang, he batted away a fly, and looked out at the corduroy cushion in the yard. The phone rang and rang, and then it rang off. No voice telling him to leave a message; just silence.

He snapped the phone closed and laid it on the table. He went out into the yard and checked that the diary hadn’t slid under the cushion. He walked back into the kitchen and looked for it on the windowsills and among the piled-up plates and bowls. Then he squeezed his eyes tightly shut again, trying to see her, to bring up her face. I don’t know what to do. Can’t you send me a message? Or some kind of sign?

Back in the sitting room, he wandered over to Roland’s aquarium. The fish had died long ago, just after he’d gone to prison, and they’d emptied the water, and now the tank was full of random objects: chess pieces, a stripy scarf, a broken kite. No diary though. He looked down the back of the sofa, and then pushed his hands under Raff’s body, feeling for the book. Raff pushed him away, swearing, and he rolled onto his back on the floor. There were flies, about ten of them, hanging out on the ceiling. The shape they made could be a messy J for Jonah. Or maybe an L for Lucy. He stared at the insects, waiting for them to form a different shape, to start spelling out a word.

They didn’t. Raff was crying now. Jonah got up and turned off the TV, and came back and perched next to him.

The sudden knock made them both jump into the air. They raced the few steps to the front door, Jonah arriving first and tugging it open.

‘Where have you …!’ he began, preparing to dive up into her arms, but he fell silent, because it wasn’t her. It was Saviour.