Never Ending Read Free Page B

real reason is to jolt them out of the sombre mood that’s taken hold.
    Caron heads back to her own room and reappears in a pair of crimson sandals.
    “D’you only wear red?” Shiv asks.
    “Nooo, because that would be weird, don’t you think?”
    Outside, they wander aimlessly along the gravel paths of a rose garden. It’s a mild evening, the day’s warmth leaching from the ground, the air fragrant with roses and wood smoke and cut grass. The distress that overwhelmed her at the window is spent; in its place, calm has settled on Shiv, so total she can’t quite believe how upset she’d been. It’s always like this afterwards. After her violent outbursts too.
    “You nervous about all this?” Caron asks.
    “Yeah,” Shiv says. “Me and therapy don’t really get on.”
    “Jee-zuss, tell me about it.”
    Shiv wants to ask why Caron’s here but isn’t sure how she’d take it. She doesn’t know what to make of her. The clothes, the brash self-confidence, it’s not how she’d expect someone to be, checking into any psychiatric clinic, let alone this one.
    As soon as they’re out of sight of the main building, Caron hoiks up her dress and shoves a hand in her knickers. “’Scuse me,” she says, producing a lighter and two cigarettes. “ Some things they can confiscate, some they can’t .”
    She lights one of the cigarettes and offers the second to Shiv.
    Shiv gapes at her. “OK, one, I don’t smoke; and, two…” She gestures at where the cigarette had come from.
    “Oh, right. Fair point.”
    They continue out of the rose garden, passing through an arch in a hedge and up some stone steps, to find themselves in a kind of grotto around an ornamental pond.
    “This place is meant to be different though,” Shiv says, picking up the thread of their earlier conversation. “It’s supposed to work .”
    “So they say .” Caron draws on the cigarette; exhales, directing the smoke away from Shiv. She nods at a weathered wooden bench. “You want to sit down for a bit?”
    “I thought you wanted to walk?” Shiv says.
    “We have walked.”
    “We’ve only come about two hundred metres.”
    “Shiv, ’ Zuss , what are you – some kind of fitness freak ?”
    “No, I just—”
    “A triathlete or something. I mean, how old are you anyway?”
    “Fifteen,” Shiv says. “You?”
    “Seventeen. So that puts me in charge and I say we do the sit-down thing.”
    “Walking, sitting – what’s the third part of the triathlon? Smoking?”
    Caron lets out a snort of laughter and smoke. “That’s actually quite funny.”
    They sit down. They fall quiet, the tranquillity of the surroundings seeming to cast a trance over them. It’s a companionable silence, as though they are old friends rather than two people who’ve only just met.
    “Why were you crying?” Caron asks, breaking the spell at last. Then, “Actually, scrub that. Why wouldn’t you be crying? Why wouldn’t any of us?” She draws on her cigarette, her lips making a kissing sound. “So, what else did you do to get sent here? Apart from the obvious.”
    “I smash stuff,” Shiv says. “Windows, doors. A load of wine bottles in Tesco. Car windscreen wipers – I went right along our street one night, ripping them off. Some of the wing mirrors too. Anything, really.”
    “Yeah?”
    Shiv tells her about setting fire to her school books.
    “Actually in one of the classrooms ?”
    “No, at home – in the garden.”
    Caron seems disappointed.
    “One time,” Shiv goes on, “I lost it so badly with the educational psychologist, she had to buzz for back-up.” She shrugs. “It’s funny, at first, when I went back to school – you know, after Greece – I worked harder than I’d ever done in my life. Class nerd.” She shudders with the chill as the evening starts to close in. “Outside school I was doing all sorts of shit but … I guess it was the one thing I hung on to.”
    “A life raft,” Caron suggests.
    “Exactly. Then, one