Her Living Image Read Free Page A

gutter for pale sodden envelopes, hoping no one had seen. He was very late. And all the roads looked different
in the rain – what you could see of them through this bloody windscreen, whose wipers moved at one sweep per minute. At a familiar junction he peered through the underwater screen and managed
to glimpse the main road, away up there to the left. So he turned left into the narrow empty lane and accelerated thankfully towards it. As he touched the brake to slow down, a thing jumped out of
the air from the left – and hit the van. Like lightning he hurled the van to the right, foot flat on the brake. When the van had slithered slowly across the road and stalled in a final
juddering jump, he could almost pretend he’d been quick enough – in minus timing – not to have hit it. Let it not be a person. Sitting in the blind streaming steamed-up van he was
oddly unable to move – got his right hand on to the door lever but couldn’t seem – didn’t seem to have any – force. He gave up after a bit and sat with his head
resting against the wheel, weak as water.
    At last a policeman opened the door, asked if he was all right and pulled him out. An ambulance moved straight across in front of his eyes with blue lights flashing and a crowd of people’s
heads moved round towards him so it seemed everything was moving, slipping, sideways and he had to lean forward, supported by the policeman, to be sick which slipped away quickly too carried in
lumps by the swirling rain. When he was sitting down he said to the policeman, “Are they – are they –”
    “What, are they what?” said the policeman patiently.
    “Dead?”
    “I don’t know sir,” said the policeman.
    After the ambulances and crowd had gone, a policeman got into the red van and carefully wiped the steamy windows. He drove slowly the right way back down the street, muttering to himself,
“Bloody hell” at the slowness of the windscreen wipers.
    The rain, driving down on to the convex gritty surface of the little lane, washed out and swirled away the last traces of the spreading red stain which Carolyn Tanner had made on the road.

Chapter 3
    Coming towards and from behind too is darkness pressing up against pressing hard hard I can see you blackness my eyes are wide open. It presses like a weight against the wide
open eyes hurting me, pressing till the eyes don’t take it in
    not the sight of blackness extending in through the eye from outside to inside the head, not the eye a channel a hole for blackness to flow through no more
    because pressed and squashed by insistent blackness it bursts to colours, each melting and oozing, flowing to the next, under the constant black pressure on the liquid film of
the eyeball. It shows purple with yellow glowing bars and flickers of red, pressing harder shows stars which melt to dribble down midnight blue with coloured shooting pains.
    Carolyn found herself in a desert. It was breathtakingly beautiful. Bare sands stretched away to the far horizons, and the sky above was so pure that she looked straight
through it to outer space, to stars and planets and deep space beyond them. Everywhere was open and led the eye on. The air, she noticed with pleasure but without surprise, was fresh and cool.
People pretended deserts were hot. The flat sands were yellow as children’s seaside beaches. She saw that the desert was perfectly clean, as if it were new. Like a million sheets of blank
white paper, or a country covered by fresh snow, without a mark. But as she turned slowly around to take in the perfect remote circle of the horizon, she thought to herself that this was better
than paper, or snow. Paper would be written on, filled with words, each of which was one choice among thousands, and the combination of whose singular choices made one meaning among hundreds,
specific and limited. The writing would confine the blank paper, narrow all its possibilities down to one. And in the country where snow fell,