Ripples on a Pond Read Free Page A

luminescent hands of her clock pointing to one thirty. Five freezing hours to daylight. And she couldn’t stand it.
    She rose then, and felt her way to the heater, an electric thing of three bars. Turned them on. With all three glowing, they shed light enough to seep through to the bathroom, light enough for her to find the shower taps.
    The agent had advertised that dogbox unit as with ‘full bathroom’. It was full, the bathtub using most of the space and the toilet the rest. Tonight, already off balance as she stepped over the bath’s rim, she slipped and fell hard, raking her thigh on the tap before landing on her hip, her elbow. Saved her head, and wondered why she’d bothered. Better if she’d smashed her skull on the tap and finished it.
    The shock of her landing, the pain of it, released tears gone underground since she’d walked from the hotel room with her case. She cowered then in the bathtub, hot water raining down. Too hot. Cowered, hugging her knees, head on her knees, howling for her stinging thigh and her bruised hip and her numb elbow – and for him.
    She loved him, had been in love with him since she was nineteen. All she’d ever wanted was to live happily ever after with him in his aunt’s five-hundred-year-old manor house, to write a hundred novels there. And with him at her side, she would have. She would have. Loved him, made beautiful perfect love with him.
    With her brother.
    â€˜Granny used to say George’s hair looked like a spill of new-minted pennies. I didn’t know what a new-minted penny was, but shiny pennies became Georgie. I had a jar full. Mum and Grandpa used to give me the shiniest ones. I never spent them. I’d sit in the sun, pouring pennies backwards and forwards from a jam jar to a little beach bucket, chanting Georgie, Georgie, Georgie.’
    The scream rising again to her throat, she grasped her mouth to hold it inside.
    Since she’d turned fifteen she’d known about little Jimmy Morrison. She’d seen photographs of a cute little boy in a sailor suit. Her mother, Myrtle, had looked after him for two years while Jenny had been at work. Until Cara had gone to Woody Creek, the little boy in the sailor suit had been the only one of her other family real to her. She’d wanted to meet him, had wanted to know her big brother.
    Had found out tonight that she’d known him since ’65. Loved him since ’65, and he’d picked up his case and his car keys and he’d left her kneeling on cold tiles on the bathroom floor, vomiting. Left her alone to howl.
    She wanted to die. Wanted to put the bathplug in and lie face down in the water and drown.
    His mother’s fault. She’d lied to him. Jenny’s gone to live with the angels . Or Myrtle’s fault. Phone her. Wake her up in her double bed and curse her, and curse Robert too, for what they’d done with their lies.
    Or phone Jenny. Wake that baby-dropping bitch and scream profanities down the line.
    The tiny room had filled with steam. It always did. She never opened the window. The drain and sewerage pipe on the outside wall would offer an intruder easy access to her bathroom window. She’d spent her life fearing strangers; spent near half of it fearing Dino Collins, believing the worst that could happen to her would be for Collins to scale that drainpipe and murder her in her bed. Wished he’d climb in now and get it over and done with. She couldn’t live with what she’d done. Didn’t want to live with it.
    Or maybe she did. A body’s reflexes won’t allow it to die easily. A body is made to live its allocated span of years.
    The gash in her thigh felt deep, long. She got to her feet and turned the water off, stepping more carefully over the rim of the bath on the way out, her hand feeling for the gash. Had to turn on the light to see it.
    The tap had peeled off a few layers of skin, but a wad of cottonwool and three