Читать книгу Starting Over - Tony Parsons - Страница 14

I was standing in front of the mirror in the bedroom, my shirt open, looking at the scar on my chest again. It was a long, livid, red wound, as though someone had tried to saw me in half, starting at the top. My fingers moved to touch it and I remembered touching the scar on my wife’s stomach after the birth of our boy. The world had marked me, as it had marked her, as if to signal that one kind of life had ended and another kind of life had begun. I started to button my shirt and Lara appeared in the doorway.

‘The cab here?’ I said.

‘We’re not getting a cab,’ she said, and got this little secret smile.

The bicycles were waiting in the hall, propped against the wall. Ruby’s pink trekking bike, still caked with fresh mud, and Rufus’ big black Saracen Dirtrax, three years old but shining like it had just come out of the box. Sometimes you give a kid a present and they have outgrown it before it is unwrapped.

I looked at the bikes and I looked at my wife. ‘Oh, you’ve got to be kidding me,’ I said.

‘It’s good for you,’ she said, and squeezed my arm. ‘And you’re ready.’ She gave me a wink. ‘Know what I mean, big boy?’