The Healer. Greg Hollingshead

Чтение книги онлайн.

      Her passenger rambles on. First they sell you their version, done out in the way they imagine resembles your own, and then they sell you what they have come to sell you. This is why to hear him you would almost think his disappointment was a small huddled sadness and not a wail of self-pity and flailing rage at the one lost.

      One of her headaches is starting. She attends to the pain as to distant thunder, and then she attends to herself thinking about her father’s rage, and that is when she notices a cast to this thinking, a cast familiar yet difficult to discern because obscured by its subject, or rather by his nature, by his own cast. And that is when she understands that these thoughts, although hers, although old catches in old succession, are kinetic with other energy that is not simply her own old emotion. And she understands that this other energy is not her own anticipation arising out of past experience. And she knows that it is another’s, that it derives from some other site that is finding repercussion here.

      And that site is the rage of her father.

      And that site is active and it is active now.

      “Did you get them?” Wakelin asked when Caroline Troyer returned to the truck. He knew she hadn’t because the whole time she was in the phone booth he had watched her lips.

      “There’s no answer.”

      “So they’re out. Aren’t we almost there?” Why was she shaking?

      “Forty minutes.”

      “And there you’ll be. Large as life. Obviously they’re not worried.”

      Half an hour before she pulled over to call he had started telling her about Jane. The feeling he had as he did this, indulged himself shamelessly, was similar to the one on those occasions, always with women, he would lay himself wide open. Sometimes in arousal, sometimes in sorrow. Like a dog on its back, lolling, thighs splayed. A guttural freedom. Here I am, grovelling in my display. Rub or scratch as you will, only be careful. I bite. He had got talking about silence, and the next thing he knew he was talking about Jane.