Scissors, Paper, Stone

Charlotte (#litres_trial_promo)

Anne; Charlotte (#litres_trial_promo)

Anne; Charles (#litres_trial_promo)

Charlotte (#litres_trial_promo)

Anne (#litres_trial_promo)

Anne; Charles (#litres_trial_promo)

Charlotte (#litres_trial_promo)

Anne (#litres_trial_promo)

PART II (#litres_trial_promo)

Charlotte (#litres_trial_promo)

Charlotte (#litres_trial_promo)

Anne (#litres_trial_promo)

Charles (#litres_trial_promo)

Janet (#litres_trial_promo)

Janet; Anne; Charlotte (#litres_trial_promo)

Janet (#litres_trial_promo)

Charlotte (#litres_trial_promo)

Epilogue (#litres_trial_promo)

A Note on the Author (#litres_trial_promo)

Keep Reading (#litres_trial_promo)

About the Publisher (#litres_trial_promo)

Prologue (#ulink_c0070a55-459d-535a-be33-f7205e6e0b3a)

At first he does not realise he is bleeding. He wakes in a state of numbness, with no memory of where he is. It takes him several minutes to notice the glutinous dark-red liquid but, even then, he cannot work out where it is coming from. It trickles past his nose with a slow insistence and gathers in a small pool at the tip of his finger. It smells of uncooked meat.

He can make no sense of his position. He appears to be lying on hard grey flagstones, his face parallel with the serrated metal surface of a manhole cover. His left cheek is pressed painfully against the pavement and he cannot open one eye. The other eye, sticky and blurred, is focusing on a blackened blob of chewing gum, trodden into the ground a few inches from his nose.

He rolls his eye around frantically in its socket, straining to see as much as possible. Out of one corner, he can make out the bridge of his nose. An arm is spread out underneath his head, disjointed and bent out of shape. He wonders briefly whose arm it is and then he works out with a jolt that it must be his and a sickness rises up inside him.

He finds that he cannot move. It is not that he feels any pain, simply that any physical exertion is impossible. Something is loose and rattling in his mouth. He presses at it with the tip of his swollen tongue and thinks it must be a tooth.

A voice that he does not recognise, male and throaty, is speaking. After a few seconds, he notices that the words make sense.

‘All right mate, all right, just keep still. The ambulance will be here soon.’

That is when he realises he must be bleeding. Instantly, he feels a desperate surge of white-hot panic. His one eye starts to weep, silently, and the tears drip down from the corner of his eyelid to the tip of his nose and on to the pavement, where they mix in with the blood, thinning it to a watery consistency. He tries to speak but no sound emerges. His mind is filling with infinite questions, each one expanding to fill the space like a sea anenome unfurling underwater.

What is happening?

Where am I?

What am I doing here?

He feels himself at the brink of something, as if he is about to fall a very long distance. He is overwhelmingly tired and his eyelid starts to droop, obscuring his field of vision even more. From the squinted sliver of sight that remains, he sees the rounded edge of a black leather boot. The boot is battered and laced and has a thick rubber sole and it is coming towards him and now it is treading into the redness that seems to be covering a larger area of pavement than before. As the boot moves away, he notices that it leaves an imprint on the ground, a stencilled trail of wet blood.

He can make out snippets of a conversation that is taking place above his head.

‘Yeah, he was knocked off his bike, poor sod.’

‘Christ. Was he wearing a helmet?’

‘Don’t think so. Driver didn’t even stop.’

‘Where’s the ambulance?’

‘On its way.’

His eyelid is pressing down, and despite telling himself that he must stay awake, that it is important to remain alert, he is powerless to stop it. Soon, he is enveloped by a throbbing darkness, a beating tide of black that crashes against the bones of his skull. He hears the sirens and, just before he allows himself to fall into nothingness, he has one startlingly clear vision of his daughter. She is twelve years old and lying in bed with the flu and he has made her buttered toast and she is too hot so she has drawn back the bedsheets.

The last thing he sees before his mind collapses is the precise curve of the pale flesh of her kneecap and he is saturated by love.

It was a curious thing, but when she was told that her husband was almost dead, her first thought was not for him but for the beef casserole. She had been in the process of boiling up a stock when the doorbell rang, tearing up parsley stalks and rummaging blindly in the cupboard for an elusive box of bay leaves. She answered the door while still wearing her apron and her hands were slightly damp as she unlocked the safety chain. A speck of indeterminate green foliage had attached itself to the cuff of her floral printed blouse. She was attempting to swat it away when she became aware of the uniformed officers on her doorstep.

There were two of them – a white man and a pretty Asian woman, standing shoulder to shoulder underneath the porch awning as though their primary purpose was to advertise the police force’s ethnically diverse recruiting practice. Anne braced herself to receive a fistful of glossy leaflets and a promotional plastic keyring, but then she noticed that neither of them was smiling.

‘Mrs Redfern?’ the man said, and the silver numbers on his epaulettes glinted in the mid-morning light.

‘Yes.’

‘It’s about your husband.’ He had flabby pink cheeks and small, round eyes and a kindness that hung loosely around his lips. He looked as though he should be outdoors, building dry-stone walls and eating thick ham sandwiches. Anne felt a twinge of sympathy for him, for how difficult he was finding it to enunciate the words. There was a short pause that Anne realised she was expected to fill.

‘Yes?’

‘I’m afraid there’s been an accident.’

She felt a coolness seep into her bones but she stood straight-backed in the doorway and did not move. The policeman looked relieved that she was not breaking down. The pretty Asian woman reached out to touch her arm. Anne became aware of the pressure of her hand and although she usually disliked the tactile presumption of strangers, she found it oddly comforting.

The man was talking, telling her something about Charles being knocked off his bicycle and being taken to hospital and the fact that he was unconscious: still alive, but only just.