But Thomas Aiken Is Dead - Part I Read Online Free Page B

would not have chosen a straightforward man. At the very least he will be insidiously smart. You had a way of finding those qualities latent in men and kindling them.
    ‘Have you spoken to his work colleagues?’
    ‘Yes.’
    ‘And did they sense any change in him before the disappearance?’
    ‘No. They said he was excited, that he was thinking of proposing.’
    What would you have said, I wonder. Yes, I suppose. But you’d come around soon enough. I don’t think you’d wear marriage well. I remember Salah’s diary.
    ‘Do you know what “The Recieving” might mean?’
    Salah’s mother cocks her head thoughtfully, rummages around in her handbag, and produces a small blue volume called The Book of Ix.
    ‘What’s this?’
    ‘Something Salah gave me once. Occult nonsense. There’s a bit in it about receiving, I think.’
    I thumb through the contents. Unification as a natural law. Technology: A modern philosopher’s stone? etc. And then: The Ritual of Receiving. I skim a few pages. Something about treating death like a disease and trying to cure it. A lot of sentences end with As decreed by Tersh Orlov at the end. A kind of amen, I suppose.
    ‘Can’t say I understand a word of it.’
    ‘Neither me,’ says Salah’s mother.
    ‘Salah was into this?’
    ‘I don’t know. He talked about it quite a bit. After a while I tried to bring it up but he didn’t want to talk about it all of a sudden.’
    ‘Odd.’
    ‘Sounds like a cult doesn’t it?’ she says.
    ‘Maybe. Did he seem that way inclined?’
    ‘What, cults?’
    ‘Yeah.’
    ‘No, he was too smart for that.’
    Nothing much to say then. We swap pleasantries but it’s soon obvious enough that the most we have in common is missing our children. When she’s gone I sit and drink and look out of the window for a while and think about phoning your mother. I don’t know what I would say. She wouldn’t talk to me anyway.
    June 7. I like to think that day is still out in some corner of time, running in the background like a computer program. Kidney stones. I hadn’t been in agony before. Funny, you can say the word, agony, but it tells you no more of the experience than a map of Paris tells you of the smell of the Seine. I am thrashing about on a hospital bed in London, so far gone I have forgotten to care about not appearing demented. I cry out sometimes, make bargains in my head with any deity that may be listening. Please, I will reform each and every one of my ways. I will be a model of penitence. Only, take this pain away. Enter your mother, garbed in an apron, a watch hanging from her breast pocket.
    ‘Oh dear,’ she says, looking me over like I’m last week’s spoiled mutton.
    ‘Oh dear?’
    ‘You do look a state.’
    I force myself into a slouch, ready to holler all manner of vile assertions about her sexual history when I catch her face. Sublime. That is the only word I have been able to find which even comes close. I believe most men have found the feeling, hands together, head bowed, at an altar. Your mother was an altar of sorts.
    ‘You’re not looking so wonderful yourself,’ I managed and she allowed herself a wry smile. It was on that fertile bed of black humour that we built a life together some time later, burrowing under each other’s skin. You would not exist had it not been for kidney stones and nursing schedules. Strange, no?
    Stranger how love has its own life-cycle. Like climbing a ladder in fog, with the reach for each rung you just have to trust the next one will be there. And one day it isn’t and you’ve reached the top already. Only the fog is still all about you, thicker even. Your mother and I were going to grow old together. It’s not like me to hold sentiments like that but it was how I felt; how she felt too, if her words were to be believed. We thrived on that wonderful feeling that came after impassioned nights in bed, when the room is in total darkness and the only sound is that of each other's breathing.