Light Read Online Free Page B

abruptly.
    “I don’t know why you come here,” she whispered. Then, vehemently: “I have seen it. I’ve seen it in that room. It stands in there, staring out of the window.”
    “Christ,” he said. “Why didn’t you tell me before?”
    “Why should I tell you anything?”
    She fell asleep soon after that. Kearney moved away from her and lay staring at the ceiling, listening to the traffic cross Chiswick Bridge. It was a long time before he could sleep. When he did, he experienced, in the form of a dream, a memory of his childhood.
    It was very clear. He was three years old, perhaps less, and he was collecting pebbles on a beach. All the visual values of the beach were pushed, as in some advertising image, so that things seemed a little too sharp, a little too bright, a little too distinct. Sunlight glittered on a receding tide. The sand curved gently away, the colour of linen blinds. Gulls stood in a line on the groyne nearby. Michael Kearney sat among the pebbles. Still wet, and sorted by the undertow into drifts and bands of different sizes, they lay around him like jewels, dried fruit, nubs of bone. He ran them through his fingers, choosing, discarding, choosing and discarding. He saw cream, white, grey; he saw tiger colours. He saw ruby red. He wanted them all! He glanced up to make sure his mother was paying attention, and when he looked down again, some shift of vision had altered his perspective: he saw clearly that the gaps between the larger stones made the same sorts of shapes as the gaps between the smaller ones. The more he looked, the more the arrangement repeated itself. Suddenly he understood this as a condition of things—if you could see the patterns the waves made, or remember the shapes of a million small white clouds, there it would be, a boiling, inexplicable, vertiginous similarity in all the processes of the world, roaring silently away from you in ever-shifting repetitions, always the same, never the same thing twice.
    In that moment he was lost. Out of the sand, the sky, the pebbles—out of what he would later think of as the willed fractality of things—emerged the Shrander. He had no name for it then. It had no shape for him. But it was in his dreams thereafter, as a hollow, an absence, a shadow on a door. He woke from this latest dream, forty years later, and it was a pale wet morning with fog in the trees on the other side of the road. Anna Kearney clung to him, saying his name.
    “Was I awful last night? I feel much better now.”
    He fucked her again, and then left. At the door of the flat she said: “People think it’s a failure to live alone, but it isn’t. The failure is to live with someone because you can’t face anything else.” Pinned to the back of the door was another note: Someone loves you. All his life Kearney had preferred women to men. It was a visceral or genetic choice, made early. Women calmed him as much as he excited them. As a result, perhaps, his dealings with men had quickly become awkward, unproductive, chafing.
    What had the dice advised? He was no more certain than he had ever been. He decided he would try to find Valentine Sprake. Sprake, who had helped him on and off over the years, lived somewhere in North London. But though Kearney had a telephone number for him, he wasn’t sure it was reliable. He tried it anyway, from Victoria Station. There was a silence at the other end of the line then a woman’s voice said:
    “You have reached the BT Cellnet answering service.”
    “Hello?” said Kearney. He checked the number he had dialled. “You aren’t on a cellphone,” he said. “This isn’t a cellphone number. Hello?” The silence at the other end spun itself out. In the very distance, he thought, he could hear something like breath. “Sprake?” Nothing. He hung up and found his way down to the Victoria Line platforms. He changed trains at Green Park, and again at Baker Street, working his way obliquely to the centre of town, where he would