Mountains of the Moon Read Free Page B

looks like he int my brother no more, looks like he’s going back to bed.
    “I wants to be
especial
,” I says.
    Surprises me. He stands up on the chair, gets a box off the top of the wardrobe. In the box is a string of conkers and he comes and ties them around my neck.
    “Seven conkers,” he says, “
cos
that’s how old you
is
.”
    “Going into care,” I grims at him. “Mum promised, if I done it gain.”
    “I think you’ve done it,” he says, “this time.”
    He puts another conker, drilled and ready, in my hand.
    “That’s for when you’re eight,” he says.

Act One

H e’s always there in the dark, on the other side of the door to sleep. It’s not the frenzy, not his hands trying to drag me from the foxhole, from the long narrow pipe; it’s not the endless pursuit dream or the little girl dead in the storm-sewer nightmare. It’s got nothing to do with physical pain or with the end of the will to live. It’s the taste of the fly agaric, the sound of it screaming when I picked it.
    The fog hasn’t lifted. Daylight has a dark green tinge sapping the color from everything. It’s my birthday, I’ve got seventeen pence. The heating pipes from a boiler in the basement bang and rattle. I pay the housing association a compulsory six pounds a week for the sound of central heating but no actual warmth. I have to get out of the apartment. I have to. Tim, at the pottery, lent me an anorak; I put it on and flip-flop down the stairs, meet Techno on the landing below, coming out of his front door with a dead rat on a platter.
    “Dinner,” he says.
    “I’d want it cooked,” I say.
    I look to see if his ears are bleeding. Mine are, fucking bastard. I go into the park next door and sit on a bench. I sit and sit. I’m Louise Alder. I’m thirty-one today. I sit and sit. Voices come through the noise in my head.
    “Will you please state your full names?”
    “Kim Hunter. Beverley Woods. Jackie Birch. Dawn Redwood. Catherine Clark.”
    “You have at one time or another used all of those names?”
    “Yes.”
    “Remind us. How old are you, Kim?”
    “I was twenty-one in September.”
    “You have come into the police station of your own accord this evening?”
    “Yes.”
    I sit and sit in the park. A kid is hurling sticks up at the horse-chestnut tree. Stick hits stick, like rattling bones. Rattling cold.
    “Have you got a habit, Kim?” DI Wilson says. “Something that you’ve not told us about? Do you need to see a doctor?”
    “About that blanket?” Mr. Book says.
    “Can we turn this fan off?” DI Wilson wonders out loud.
    I sit and sit in the park.
    “Shall we get it over with?” DI Wilson says. “Are you OK to continue?”
    Resume.
    “Was it your gun?”
    “No.”
    “Where is the gun now?”
    “I threw it off the Suspension Bridge.”
    “When you pulled the trigger did you know what you were doing?”
    “Yes.”
    “You intended to kill?”
    “Yes, the person I was aiming at.”
    “Why did you want to kill the person you were aiming at?”
    “I’m not prepared to say.”
    “You shot Quentin Sumner by mistake?”
    “Yes.”
    “You were aiming at someone else?”
    “Yes.”
    I sit and sit in the park. The horse-chestnut tree looks unreal, in this fog and green light, like a pantomime prop. One limb spreads wider than the others. Perfect for a noose. Perfect drop.
    “Nice day for it,” a man says, walking his hyena past.
    Every day we begin again. I go back to the apartment and unpick stitches with frozen teeth and fingers, cut and pin together a patchwork of velvet from charity-shop dresses. The floor cushion is half made when the lampdies, the sewing-machine needle stops mid-seam as my meter runs out of electric. My giro didn’t come. I sit down and light the camping stove, it’s running low on gas. A blue light starts casting around the apartment. Something has happened in the pub, an ambulance is in the street. I didn’t hear any screaming, usually I hear the screaming. I