Under My Skin. Zoe Markham

Чтение книги онлайн.

СКАЧАТЬ my chicken with renewed vigour.

      ‘I might get you a vindaloo next time,’ he chuckles. ‘See how far gone those taste buds really are!’

      I see that drunken rugby fan again, and try to sit up a little straighter and eat a little slower. I’ve never been much of girly girl, but I mean, there are limits.

       CHAPTER FOUR

      My relationship with Dad, one that was never strong to start with and that disintegrated into a hateful, unspeakably broken thing when it happened, starts to improve a little every day. I think that’s the main reason the loneliness and frustration take a while to build up. Once I get over the initial shock of the changes, and with the cottage really being a million times nicer than the flat, it starts to feel a lot more like freedom than I was expecting. I spend most of my days locked up in the attic reading, where nothing in the world, inside or out, can get to me. It’s like having my own ‘tallest tower’; metaphorical dragons circle the roof above me, and no prince, however charming, could ever get near. This is an infinite comfort rather than a cause for tears. Disney would hate me.

      The hatch feels like a steel door, and I leave my worries at the bottom of the stepladder every time I clamber up it. And as the days begin to pass with no sign of trouble, I eventually start to grow a little braver, and begin to widen my territory, like some kind of nervous woodland animal. I don’t really have any way of keeping track of time. My days are structured around the growls emanating from my stomach, but in terms of the number of days that are passing, I have no idea. Dad works as many weekends as weekdays, it seems, and without being able to see outside, or feel anything other than cold, it could be mid-winter, or early spring for all I know. The number of books I get through becomes my only way to guess at the time passing. I read one, sometimes two novels a day, and as my ‘read’ pile grows I can make a rough guess at how long we’ve survived here. I try not to look too closely though, because the more books that teeter on the pile, the more times I remember reading each one, the lower my supply of vaccine dips.

      When I can’t take the cold of the attic any longer, I start to read down by the fire, keeping low on the sofa under a blanket, and tensing at every sound from outside to begin with, but with each chapter I make it through safely I begin to relax a little more – and eventually I come to enjoy the warmth and the comfort. The windows and doors are locked, the curtains are pulled tight across heavy blinds, and I finally start to feel safe in the house itself, rather than just in the attic. The urgency and the panic Dad manages to maintain more quietly now starts to slowly, dangerously, slip away from me.

      I start to do exercises every day to help with my limp and my general level of fitness. They’re ridiculously repetitive and boring, but once I get comfortable having the radio on, enjoying the company it provides without worrying too much about every little outside noise and threat it could be masking, they don’t feel so bad. And the worrying dwindles with every song I start to sing along to; because if they were out there, surely they would have come for me by now?

      With my new muscles (ha, ok, not quite) I drag the furniture around in the living room so the TV faces away from the window, that way none of its tell-tale colours can possibly shine through to the outside world, and I can watch back-to-back DVDs all day long, never even needing to change out of my PJs. My life is one long, open-ended sick day. After a full rotation of my books, and an impressive run at Buffy on DVD, I feel myself kick down a gear, and relax more thoroughly, to settle into it – to enjoy it even. The more days that pass with no one hammering on the door, or hassling Dad at work, the safer, and the more untouchable I feel.

      I should have known the feeling could never last. Holidays, sick days, anything like that, they should all come to an end. If they don’t, they eventually up end being every bit as frustrating as whatever it is they were an escape from.

      *

      I don’t see much of Dad, but when I do, I can tell by his outfits that summer must be drawing to a close out there, and that’s around the time when I inevitably start to get tired of my own company. The pattern of the days and the weeks becomes all too familiar, and the DVDs and books follow suit. No matter how much you adore a book, there’s a limit to how many times you can re-read it in quick succession. Same goes for your favourite films and TV series, there are only so many times you can re-watch them back-to-back before they start to lose their magic. Dad’s always offering to get me more – he’s never happier than when I’m reading or watching TV because I’m ‘resting’. That’s all he ever wants me to do. Stay still, stay safe.

      He leaves before six in the mornings, and he’s rarely home before ten in the evening. We eat together whenever he gets in, and then he quietly heads down to the basement to put in even more hours, while I make my way up to bed. It’s become a strange existence; like being in limbo almost, just sitting here waiting to see if he can create the compounds and produce the vaccine from scratch. There’s this big, invisible timer ticking away in the background the whole time. Sometimes I can turn it right down, like when I’m reading; not just normal reading, but when I totally, one hundred per cent lose myself in a book. The problem is that it’s getting harder to lose myself in ones I’ve read a hundred times. The less immersed I am, the louder the ticking becomes. The louder the ticking becomes, the more it stops me losing myself, and the vicious circle begins, and self-perpetuates.

      I’ve started to wear the same clothes for too many days. I still have a bath every day, but that’s only because my skin falls off me in terrifying chunks if I don’t (yeah, I tried it). I eat regularly and plentifully because if I don’t my vision swims and I can’t read. I chat cheerfully to Dad for a few minutes between mouthfuls each evening because if I don’t, he’ll worry. I basically do the absolute minimum to get by, in terms of expected behaviour: enough to convince Dad that I’m ok, but it’s tough enough to do to let me know that I’m really not ok. I’m not sure exactly at what point this all happened, but I feel it all the same. And I know that it’s not good.

      When I hear the car leave in the mornings, I find myself heading straight for the attic again, and I feel like I’ve come full circle since we’ve been here. I’ve explored my territory, and exhausted it, and now I’ve come back to the beginning and there’s nowhere else to go. I read up there until my stomach complains so loudly that I have to come back down and cook bacon, or eggs, or steak, or chicken. It all tastes the same so it doesn’t matter to me which meat comes at which time of the day. The only person I ever speak to, other than myself, is Dad. And our couple of hours or so in each other’s company from the first week we were here has steadily disintegrated into what’s typically now no more than twenty minutes on any given day. We never really talked to each other before all this. Back when things were ‘normal’ he was always at work – always pulling overtime evenings and weekends. It actually wasn’t much different to now I suppose, except now, he’s all I have.

      Most weekends he still goes to the hospital to work, and if he does stay here, ‘here’ tends to mean ‘in the basement’. He never stops working. He keeps the race-against-time vibe going, although it’s quieter now, and that makes it feel more dangerous, more sinister somehow. Like he doesn’t even have time to talk about it. He used to tell me about his day when he got back, about the things he’d been working on and how they were bringing him closer to replication. I never understood any of it, but it was comforting to hear all the same. It felt like he was keeping me involved, not letting me forget that he was on the case, that it was all going to be ok. Now he hardly mentions a thing about it; the most I get is a vague, passing reference.

      ‘I’m getting closer every day Chlo; I’m getting two, sometimes even three hours a day in working on the compounds in the lab, plus four or five at home most nights.’

      ‘That’s great, Dad. How about sleep though? How much of that are you getting?’

СКАЧАТЬ