Bred in the Bone Read Online Free

what she did now; this was who she was. It was changing her. She had stopped thinking of herself as tragic, afflicted by circumstance and buffeted by the fates. She was good at what she did, and consequently Sharp Investigations was doing quite well, thank you. Certainly any evening spent in the company of her college friends still trying to eke out careers in the arts these days afforded her a different perspective from the previous one of having her nose pressed against the sweet-shop window.
    It wasn’t just the fact that they were permanently skint; the things that seemed so shatteringly important to them were beginning to strike her as petty and insubstantial, and she was becoming decreasingly shy of saying as much. She recalled with mischievous pride an exchange she had over dinner at her friend Michelle’s place, where Michelle’s flatmate and fellow dancer Gareth was unloading at quite unnecessary length about a review of a show he’d performed in at the Fringe.
    ‘You’re exposed up there: you lay yourself completely bare, utterly vulnerable. So when you read something like this you feel violated. These people know what they’re doing: they aim to wound you. They want to see you bleed.’
    ‘Oh for fuck’s sake,’ Jasmine had said, perhaps one glass too many of vino bringing forth veritas. ‘Man up, it’s only a review.’
    ‘Of course it’s only a review to you ,’ Gareth retorted. ‘You’ve never had one, so you wouldn’t know. You’d need to have been up there on a stage to understand what I’m talking about.’
    There had been a time when this might have crushed Jasmine, to have her former aspirations thrown back in her face. That time was over.
    ‘Well, Gareth, you’ve got me there. But look at it from my point of view: once you’ve been shot at a couple of times, by somebody who is not aiming to wound, it kind of makes it hard to see what’s so violating about some wee wank at the Scotsman only giving you two stars.’
    She was developing – some might say cultivating – a reputation for being spiky and a little unsympathetic, and she had stopped worrying about whether this meant she was wounded and embittered. Instead she had decided to wear bitch and see how it fitted. It wasn’t an everyday garment, but like the leather jacket she had on for the gig it felt just right now and again, when the context called for it.
    She was okay. She was definitely okay.
    Then she saw a ghost.
    The support had finished and the seats began to fill up more while the road crew got busy dismantling their kit. People returnedfrom the bar bearing pints in plastic tumblers, while others, arriving in time for the headliners, scanned the rows for a free spot, the seating being unreserved. Jasmine felt a growing buzz as the roadies made the final preparations: taping set-lists, draping towels, checking pedals.
    She watched a guy and a girl make their way along the row two in front, apologising cheerfully to the people having to stand up to let them past. They were around her age, both wearing T-shirts bearing the band’s name, though not identical garments. They didn’t look up as they progressed, only at the people they were shifting and occasionally at the stage, so they didn’t see Jasmine, meaning she had no way of knowing whether the guy recognised her, but she definitely knew him. Having realised he was familiar, it took her a few moments of mentally thumbing through images until she could find a background against which he fitted, but when she got there it froze her.
    His name was Scott, or possibly Sam. She didn’t quite remember that part, but she remembered that he had still been in fifth year at school, although looked older. She could remember which school (Glasgow Academy); she could remember the drainpipe jeans and Diesel-logo belt he’d been wearing; and she remembered how he kissed. It had been soft and slow, each kiss all there was and all he wanted: no wandering hands, no impatiently