Interzone 251 Read Online Free

Edinburgh could have become the Lindsay in front of me. Just to begin with, she appears several inches shorter than she was then – although I put that down to the way ungainly teenagers seem to have longer limbs than ordinary human beings do.
    We order a light lunch – salads, a bottle of some innocuous German white wine. I’m not really in the mood for eating. I’m entranced by this creature, just as I once was. If I were younger, I’d say I was falling in love with her, but it isn’t that. I wish in a way it were. That would be, somehow, easier to cope with.
    What I do know is that, if indeed Lindsay is pregnant, then I’m not the father. We spent no night of passion together. I know this for a certainty. In the old tales men lost themselves in Faeryland and dallied with the Queen, yet later forgot entirely their lovemaking. They forgot only because the Queen could cast a spell upon their minds; otherwise they’d have remembered everything until the last breath left their body. It would surely be this way with Lindsay. Surely there’d be some kind of body-memory? Surely?
    Yet who she is is a mystery to me. I hardly dare even touch her hand.
    We wait until the food’s arrived before, moving carefully and warily like participants in a minuet, we approach the reason for our being here.
    “I’m not asking you to bear any…paternal responsibility, Nick,” she says, spearing a slice of tomato.
    “Before we even start going into that,” I say, “I think we need to sort out what actually happened.”
    “You said that on the phone.”
    “Tell me the story from your side.”
    “You’re serious?”
    “I really am.”
    She smiles. “I’m not sure I like the notion of having to remind you.”
    “That’s the trouble, Lindsay. It’s not a reminder. I don’t have any knowledge of this – and I’m not pretending.” I remember what Dverna said the other day. “I’m not trying to play any kind of stupid game. I truly don’t know what’s going on.”
    She sighs, and reaches out her hand to place it over mine on the table. Her touch is cool and dry, as I imagined it would be.
    “Well, you remember, back in July, you came and stayed with us for that business meeting you—”
    “No, Lindsay. I
don’t
remember that. I had to cancel. I had the flu.”
    “You seemed a little under the weather, but—”
    “I was in Bristol. I never even got as far as the station. I had to cancel my appointment, and I lost the job because of it.” Not that there weren’t plenty of other jobs, because there’s always demand for a freelance accountant, but the Sitemaster contract was one I’d been particularly keen to nail down.
C’est la vie.
    “I’m trying to tell you something,” says Lindsay.
    “Sorry. I shouldn’t have interrupted.”
    “You were a little under the weather, I said. I don’t mean you were sniffling or feverish, or anything like that. You seemed a little…confused, maybe? There was something artificial about you, as if you were playing a role, like one does in front of people one doesn’t know very well. Dad said later you seemed so out of kilter with your normal self he could have passed you in the street without recognising you. Me, I hadn’t seen you since I was, what, fourteen, fifteen, so you didn’t seem so strange to me, but I could still tell…” She takes a deep breath. “You don’t do drugs, do you?”
    “Just single malt whisky, and then not often enough.”
    “We wondered, the three of us, after you’d left, if that was why you seemed so… Of course, Mum and Dad didn’t know what else had happened while you were there.” She stares at me meaningfully with those cloudy blue eyes.
    The McBrides have one of those big old tall houses a couple of miles south of Edinburgh’s centre, built of red sandstone and built to last. Most of the other houses up and down the street have been converted for flats or into hotels – well, bed-and-breakfasts, really. Where the McBrides