Alys, Always Read Online Free

left face-down on green velvet sofas, a dappled rocking horse in a bay window. A tortoiseshell cat sits beside a vase of pussy willow, its cold yellow eyes tracking me without real interest. I pass on a little farther and am peering down into a basement kitchen when the person who is moving around in front of the cooker notices me and comes to the window and tweaks the angle of the plantation shutters, denying me my view.
    In the high street I go into an expensive teashop, grab an empty table in the window, and order a cup of hot chocolate and a pistachio macaroon. An elderly man in a dashing scarf sits at the next table, working his way through a newspaper full of weather stories: cancelled flights, ice-skating in the Fens, the plight of Welsh hill farmers. Outside, strangers are sliding around, clutching at each other for stability, laughing. There is a strange festive atmosphere: the usual rules do not apply.
    I drink my hot chocolate and get my book out of my pocket and start to read, shutting everything out, enjoying the sense of being part of something and yet at arm’s length from it. I do my best reading in cafés. I find it hard to read at home, in absolute silence.
    ‘Is this seat taken?’ someone asks. I look up reluctantly. It’s a young woman with a toddler in a snowsuit, his round cheeks scalded with the cold.
    ‘I’m just going,’ I say, knocking back the dark syrupy dregs of my drink. Then I leave her to it.
    I’m nearly home when my phone rings. Someone introduces herself as Sergeant Kate Wiggins. She says she has been assigned to the family of Alice Kite, to help them through ‘this very painful time’. As I listen, the unwelcome sensationsbegin again: the prickle of panic, of helplessness. Feelings which, over the last few days, have started to recede a little.
    I know what she’s going to say before she says it.
    ‘I don’t think I can,’ I say quickly, without having to reflect. And saying the words, I feel the fear losing purchase, just slightly.
    Kate Wiggins pauses. ‘I know it must be difficult for you,’ she says, in an understanding voice. ‘You’ve had a very traumatic experience. Sometimes, witnesses find that meeting the family can actually be cathartic, on a personal level.’
    ‘I don’t want to. I’ve told the police everything that happened. I don’t see what a meeting would achieve. It would just stir things up again.’
    ‘Of course, it’s not helpful to generalise but quite often, in circumstances like this, the family isn’t looking for answers. They just want to meet the person who was there. To say thank you, really. I know, for example, that Mrs Kite’s family, her husband, her son and daughter, are relieved she wasn’t alone at the end. I think they are grateful to you and it would mean a lot if they could meet you and tell you that themselves.’
    ‘Well – I have stuff of my own going on,’ I say, desperate to get her off the phone. ‘It’s not really something I feel up to right now.’
    ‘Absolutely. Take your time,’ Kate Wiggins says generously, seizing on the tiny opportunity I’ve clumsily afforded her. ‘There’s no hurry. Let me know when you feel ready.’
    ‘Fine,’ I say, pretending to take down her number. ‘Yes, of course.’ Then I go home and do my best to forget all about it.
    Oliver is doing the post, tearing apart corrugated cardboard parcels to reveal novelty golf guides and pink paperbacks with line drawings of high heels and cupcakes on the covers, chucking most of them into a large carton bound for Oxfam or (if he can be bothered, which he usually can’t) eBay. There’s an idiotic tyranny to the post delivered to the books desk: wave after wave of ghosted memoirs and coffee-table photography retrospectives and eco-lifestyle manuals, none of which even vaguely fit the
Questioner
’s remit. Maybe one book in ten is put aside, waiting to be assigned to a reviewer.
    I do my best to have nothing to do with Oliver, the son of