Winterton Blue Read Online Free Page B

cold enough for her to see her breath. She relishes most of all the way it feels detached from the rest of the house—from Vernon’s jocular presence, in particular—but her mother has promised her the room directly underneath, one floor down, when she comes back.
    More space to settle down in, she said, ominously, More space to spread out. Just needs a good airing.
    Anna sits shivering on the bed, turning the key-ring over in her hands. The fob is an oblong of lacquered metal with a lurid picture of Christ on the cross. On the reverse, the inscription says,
Greetings from Greece!
She knows her mother has never been to Greece; Anna assumes it was given to her by a guest, or perhaps someone left it behind. The keys are shiny and sharp, freshly cut. She imagines her mother, scheming, planning, getting keys cut and rooms aired. Anna tosses the key-ring onto the windowsill. Scanning the room, she thinks about what she will need to bring back with her; some books, certainly, and warmer clothes. From far below comes a sound like a piano falling down the stairs, a gale of laughter, an abrupt, barking chorus: Vernon and her mother are singing. Anna listens as the duo wander round the edges of the song, trying to find a tune; at last she recognizes it: Everything Stops for Tea. It’s probably their way of dropping a hint. On her way back downstairs, Anna adds ear-plugs to her mental list. She may be slightly deaf, but she doubts she’ll ever be deaf enough to obliterate that racket.

    Lewis does the thing he always used to do on the underground: takes his place in the fourth carriage along. There’s no reason to it; just a superstition he has—or used to have—like not walking on the cracks in the pavement, or keepinga hand on the rail of the escalator, or saying touch wood to ward off evil spirits. He’s spent the last two nights at a hostel above the bus station, lying on the narrow bunk, listening to foreign tongues and foreign laughter, until now he feels he can be no one again. He senses the change in his blood: it’s London, forming like a new scab; sore, but hardening up, covering the raw wound of Wales. The other person inside him, the one Lewis thought he’d left behind, is once more inside his skin. Today, he makes his move. He doesn’t know where he’s going: he doesn’t think it matters.
    The tube is packed full of people: workers reading or pretending to sleep, tourists with rucksacks and expectant faces. The young woman standing opposite Lewis has sleek brown hair and chocolate-coloured eyes. She wears a silver necklace with a pendant on it. He can’t see what it represents; she clutches it in her fingers, zigging it along the chain when she talks to her friend, a man wearing heavy clothes and a thick woollen scarf. When the man talks, she puts the pendant in her mouth and sucks on it. Despite the fact that he senses a no-go zone all around him—that the other commuters have made a silent agreement with each other to give him more space than they think he deserves—he can’t appear
that
dodgy, because over her friend’s shoulder, the young woman with the lovely eyes looks directly at him and smiles. Out of old habit, Lewis gets off at Clapham. He walks the verge of the common, taking the scent of wet leaves and car fumes into his lungs. On the fourth bench along, he puts his kitbag on his lap and tips his face up to catch the pale autumn sunshine. He looks like someone basking.
    Now, Manny, he says, under his breath, Let’s see.

    What he saw was himself, standing at Manny’s front door. He wouldn’t normally knock, he would slip along the passage,through the back gate, into the yard, like he used to when he was a kid. But it wasn’t a normal situation. He’d been a long time away from Cardiff; he didn’t know how this visit would go down. Lewis had already considered the possibility of Carl being around, not knowing how