Interzone 251 Read Online Free Page A

sometimes put houseguests is in a small stone shed at the bottom of the back garden – a “guest chalet,” as Elsa likes grandly to call it. It was probably a stable at one point. Now it has a comfortable little bedroom, with a loo and a shower room off it. Just right for a night or three; any longer and it’d start to get claustrophobic, I’d guess. But there’s more privacy than in the main house.
    I arrived, so Lindsay tells me, in the middle of the Thursday evening. My train had got in late, having sat for a couple of hours outside Newcastle for no reason anyone had ever thought to tell us. The McBrides had held dinner for me – which was easy because, it being summer, dinner was a cold chicken curry salad, one of Elsa’s specialities. We sat around the table long after we’d finished eating. I said no to the port Connor produced, because I wanted to be bright-eyed and bushy-tailed for my meeting with the Sitemaster people the next day. And then off down the garden path I trotted…
    “You were really energised when you got home the next day,” says Lindsay. She’s stroking the back of my hand with her thumb, the kind of gesture longstanding lovers make. “You said the meeting went really well and you were certain the job was yours.”
    When I got home, she tells me, it was about one o’clock and she was alone in the house. Connor and Elsa were still out at work, and weren’t expected home until seven. Lindsay, who’d completed her finals in biochemistry a couple of weeks earlier, was basically just having fun lolling around the house and relaxing with books.
    “Nothing for it but you were going to take me out to lunch at the Haddon House to celebrate, which we did.” She has the very clear, almost accentless voice you sometimes find in Scots people, with the same timbre as a choirboy’s singing. She doesn’t say why it was we both ended up in the “guest chalet”, just that this was where we went when we got home from lunch. There’s no embarrassment about her, no girlish blushes. She’s quite matter-of-fact, and amused more than anything else.
    “I’m sorry,” I say. “I shouldn’t have allowed this to happen. It was a monumental abuse of hospitality. Your dad’ll be wanting to beat me to a pulp.”
    She chuckles. “You didn’t have any choice in the matter. It was my idea. Do you remember that time when we were both wee, Nick, and we were taken for a long ride in that awful old boat of a car Dad used to have?”
    “I remember it.”
    “I fell in love with you then, Nick, and I’ve never completely fallen out of it again.”
    “I know what you mean. But—”
    “But what, Nick?”
    I was about to say to her that all my life I’ve felt that same way, except that it’s the eight-year-old boy who’s loving the five-year-old girl, and the situation, and the memory of an encounter that was special and shining and greater than life, and can never be repeated. But I bite the words back, realising how cruelly they might strike her, as if the grown-up Lindsay was valueless.
    I mumble something vacuous about the past being hard to recapture.
    “Oh, we had our merry moments, you and I,” she says after a pause. “The room was full of sunlight and there was a sea gull in the garden telling all the other birds this was his own special territory. And then, finally, I realised what time it was and that I’d better run inside and have a bath to wash the smell of sex off me before Mum and Dad got home.” She chuckles again.
    I can’t imagine what her face would look like in passion.
    Her eyes are serious once more. “And you can remember
nothing
of this, Nick?”
    I play the gallant. “I wish I did. You’re a very lovely woman, Lindsay.” I almost called her a
young
woman, but caught myself in time.
    “Nor the evening? I think Mum was fairly sure something had been going on, but she didn’t know what and she wasn’t about to ask. And Dad – well, you know Dad. All evening long it was