Loss of Separation Read Online Free

noticed she did a lot when she was agitated. I was struck by how strong her feelings for me were. I had to keep reminding myself that she had known me far longer than I had known her. She had saved my life. I was still getting used to the village, the people, my unreal role. Hot emotions were something I was unused to. Everything in my life was slow since I came out of the coma. My recovery, my new timetable. Even the shock of Tamara's abandonment nibbled agonisingly into me like the tide at the uppermost reaches of the shoreline.
    I spread my hands; I had nothing to say.
    I opened the door and the seagull with the broken back was before me, pinned cruciform to the lilac sky, blood fizzing from its opened beak and cloaca, trying to flap its wings and succeeding only in jerking its wrenched body from side to side. I blinked it into mist and moved up the lane to The Fluke. My mind was throwing up all kinds of visual treats since the hit-and-run - memories, nightmares, fantasies all spliced together and given the full widescreen, 3D treatment - but that didn't mean it was getting any easier to deal with.
    Movement behind the frosted glass. Cleaners getting the pub ready for opening time.
    I reached into my pocket and pulled out a length of yellow string. My fingers were gnarly and stiff. The doctors had suggested I do finger exercises; and try to use my hands as much as possible. Make bread, they suggested. Take up pottery. But Charlie had put me on to knots. The intricacy of it, as opposed to the vagueness of dough or clay, was difficult to overcome and my fingers grew tired very quickly, but I felt the benefit in them. They were always painful, but slowly I was reclaiming the dexterity I'd lost. Thankfully, the right hand, which had plunged through the windscreen, had suffered very little in terms of nerve loss. The lacerations, and how they'd healed into thick worming scars, were the problem. It felt, all the time, as if I was trying to thread a needle while wearing a thick mitten.
    Charlie had given me the string, and a photocopied leaflet containing five basic knots to learn. 'Get thems mastered and you'll make fishman yet,' he told me, fins of silver hair flapping around his head like something he'd caught and ditched in a bucket. 'I'll have y'out on morning tide pullin' in y'dinner with us afore y'knows it.'
    I hobbled on to the sand. I knew the reef knot from school, but I worked it now, liking its simplicity, the symmetry in the construction of it, the finished appearance. Left over right, then under. Right over left, then under.
    The figure of eight. A stopper knot. Sometimes doubled to add weight to an end for throwing. I tied that one a little harder than I meant to and struggled for five minutes trying to get it loose. The tips of my fingers were already beating. They no longer seemed like my fingers. One of the nails had a warp in it that would not correct itself. Trapped blood formed black half moons under others. It bothered me that the nurses had not thought to extract it, as if they predicted I would not be concerned with looking my best again once I was up and about. How much time could a shattered man have for vanity?
    I sat down in the sand and with the yellow string tied a sheet bend into my shoelace. A stiff wind swept the surface of the beach into skirls and skrims. Moments of foam out to sea. Gulls hovered or stood on the exposed groynes, staring west. Their beaks were open, black spike tongues. It was as if they were tasting the weather. I glanced west too. Invariably I walked up the beach; it was easier with the prevailing wind at my back.
    Now I decided it was time to walk down it, against the weather. It would be harder, but that was good, necessary. There was a pub at the end of this stretch, and it would be open by the time I reached it.
    One more knot first. I found a piece of driftwood and secured the string against it with a clove hitch. These five basic knots I felt I knew now. I could do them