Wolves Read Free Page B

them? Given that I have told him I’m my own master, alone and fancy-free, and on the sick? Of course I cannot go. Shall I tell him that I am incapacitated? That I have lost my face, my hands?
    ‘Well, how about just for a week, at least?’ he says.
    ‘I can’t,’ I tell him, increasingly desperate. ‘I can’t.’
    Mandy has a touching belief in mornings; in her mind, for a little while at least, they have the power to set all things to rights. ‘Come on in,’ she says. ‘The door’s not locked.’
    She’s in the bath. The water’s heat has flushed her scars: her face is edged and crazed, more shattered than torn.
    ‘I’ll wash your back.’
    She’s put on weight, slumped here, undone, day after day in these white rooms. Slim pads of fat give under my fingers as I work soap along her spine.
    ‘That’s nice.’
    ‘I’ll do your hair.’
    She turns, her face sliced up into a smile. ‘You do too much for me.’
    She slides deeper into the water, raises her legs out of the water, and fetches me the shampoo from the shelf behind the bath. I take the pink bottle from between her clamped feet, my throat in spasm, and she shimmies herself upright again. While I work the shampoo through her hair she raises her knees and rubs her stumps against them, washing them. A smell rises. Soap and roses.
    ‘Who was it on the phone last night?’
    Falling in love with a person is hard. Falling in love with a world is easy. Confusing the two loves is easier still. I spend the day wandering round the house in mourning for it all. Mandy’s kitchen. Mandy’s underwear. Mandy’s pillows and shoes. I love her scarves and her seven different kinds of toothpaste (a flavour for each day of the week). I love those little blue bottles of essential oils gathering dust on her bathroom shelf. I was always a sucker for Mandy’s world. Her visits to out-of-the-way antique shops. Her cutlery drawer, every knife and fork a ‘piece’. Wine glasses from an arcade near the Palace of Sports. Cushions from a woman who lives on one of the old lime tree avenues in the Turkish quarter. In Mandy’s world, everything has an aesthetic value. The humblest objects acquire a small but telling erotic charge.
    Packing is the work of a moment. Laptop and charger, a couple of jumpers, underwear, jeans. Mandy has a hospital appointment this morning. She’s back from her fitting at two. I haven’t got long. Every time a taxi passes outside the window, my heart gives a tiny jolt.
    It’s all right. There is time. I wonder if Mandy’s hands are dexterous enough yet to allow her to unlock her front door? They must be. She managed all right the day she walked out on me in the restaurant. Only that was a Tuesday. Maybe the cleaner was in.
    I don’t know.
    Anyway, I should phone her, if only to warn her, to tell her I’m gone.

FOUR
    A t its grandest, the north-coast highway is a monster. Its four-lane carriageways are barely enough to feed and relieve the half-dozen ferry and container ports that have spread – a slow and steady flood of glass and steel – to fill the mouths of every valley, making islands of a dozen basalt hills.
    To the east, the landscape is economically unimportant and much less dramatic, and the road, having expended its strength on valley-spanning ribcage viaducts and swooping white-tiled tunnels, withers at last to a tiny, chicaned, suburban memory of itself. A main road. A high street. A bus route. At each junction, mini-roundabouts form pronounced bulges.
    There is not much else to see. A shingle bank blocks my view of the waves. There are some shops – an uneasy mix of tourist services and struggling convenience stores. Hair Trendz. Raz the Newsagent. Artisanal Fruit Beer & Cheese for that ‘Tasty Gift’.
    This is as far as the national rail network will take me. The regular railway loops south from here, its banked-up rail bed forcing the narrow-gauge local service into a weed-choked alley, embankments on the landward side