Falling Glass Read Free

would take.
    She reconsidered for one beat, two…
    She shook her head. “No,” she said aloud. She safetied the weapon, put it in a plastic bag in the freezer, closed the fridge door.
    Ended her conversation with death.
    She walked the length of the caravan to check on the girls.
    The nightlight was casting a pink glow over the buckled aluminum walls. Sue’s blanket had fallen to the floor. She picked it up, replaced it. Claire was sleeping like a rabbit, curled on all fours, hunched. The barking dog hadn’t woken either of them.
    Rachel stared at them, trying to feel love rather than resentment.
    But she was so damn tired. Tired of lying, hiding, running.
    “Good night,” she whispered and went back to the front door.
    She opened it and took a last look out. “Go ahead, Richard. Send your men, I don’t think I even care anymore,” she whispered sadly.
    She locked the door and put the chain across.
    She tiptoed to her room – the only real bedroom in the caravan – and sat on the fold-out bed. The blankets hadn’t been tossed in a week. They gave off an odour.
    She reached for her fags, opened the box, discovered that it was empty.
    Rain began to fall on the metal roof.
    Ding, ding, ding, ding, ding, ding…
    “Christ,” she muttered.
    Surely the girls would be better off without her. Rachel looked about her – this , this was madness.
    She fished in the ashtray and found a ciggy with an inch left in it.
    She flipped Big Dave’s Zippo. The tobacco tasted of sand. She blew smoke at a midge and lay back on the sheets.
    The roof dissolved.
    Pine trees. Constellations. An arrow of cloud intersecting with the moon. There were poppies along the granite wall and a wind bringing the smell of fennel, saffron and boggy emptiness.
    She turned off the nightlight and stared through the lace curtains at the caravan park. A green phosphorescence was playing on the TV aerial of Big Dave’s caravan. She’d seen it before and she watched while it fizzed there for a moment – if fizzed was the right word – before dissipating into the black air. Most everyone was asleep now. Dave was on earlies and the football match appeared to have finished. Stu and that girl of his were probably the only ones still up, amped out of their minds or cooking blue belly to sell in Derry, or to her.
    She finished the smoke, climbed under the sheets.
    Darkness.
    And when the traffic on the A2 died away, quiet.
    She couldn’t sleep. Yes, the methamphetamine was still in her system but she hadn’t pulled an eight for years.
    She was lucky these days to get four.
    He wasn’t the problem. She no longer thought about Richard or that Sunday morning…No, the problem wasn’t the past but the present. Money, Claire, truant inspectors, Sue, lawyers, private detectives, the Police Service of Northern Ireland. Drugs.
    Rachel tugged the sheet over her face.
    Wind.
    Rain.
    And, finally, at around two, a few hours of erased existence…
    Photons from a different star.
    Prayers seeping through the bedroom wall.
    She stirred. The room was heady, the smell: eucalypt, pine, seaweed. She lifted the sheet from her face. Rubbed her eyes. Her fingertips were soft. Uncalloused. Unworked. She noted this with neither satisfaction nor regret. Work was for workers.
    She lowered her legs to the floor. She looked for her watch but remembered that it had fallen off her wrist in town. Always sly, the Rolex had seized its chance to keep forever its knowledge of date and time, second and minute. Perhaps it was even a bold attempt on the watch’s part to set her free of such notions. She smiled, she liked that, but it wasn’t true – the watch was a present from Richard, it was his ally not hers. And it wasn’t even funny. She could have hocked it for five hundred quid in Coleraine.
    She yawned, pulled back the curtain.
    Blue van, red van, van so old it had lost all its colour, VW Beetle.
    She pushed the window open. A cold wind from the Atlantic. She shivered.
    The