Never Ending Read Online Free Page B

the lenses of her sunglasses. Like a 1960s film star.
    “It looks bigger in the flesh,” she said.
    “The villa is made of flesh ?” Declan said.
    Shiv took her first proper look at the building. It was in the Greek style, with white walls, blue window frames and shutters, tiled roof, and a pergola draped with vines that shaded a dining area on the lower terrace. A balcony overlooked the poolside – an ideal place to watch the sun set over the bay. That was where Mum and Dad would share a bottle of red, last thing, their voices drifting to Shiv’s room. She still associated family holidays with falling asleep to her parents’ murmured conversation somewhere outside at the end of a long, warm day.
    “There’s a welcome hamper!” Dad called from inside the villa.
    “Wine?” Mum called back.
    In reply, Dad made a whining noise.
    “It’s a form of mental cruelty,” Dec said. “ Dad Jokes . Banned in forty-seven countries around the world.”
    “Forty-six,” Shiv said. “North Korea refused to sign the treaty.”
    “Ah, yes, you’re right , Shivoloppoulos. Can’t believe I forgot.”
    Declan got up and perched on the edge of Mum’s sunlounger. Shiv sat the other side of Mum, who put an arm round each of them, massaging their backs.
    “So, Child A and Child B – do we like it here?”
    “Hmm,” Shiv said, “I suppose it’ll do until we reach the holiday villa.”
    At that moment, Dad appeared, wearing his tartan swimming shorts and goggles, his nose gleaming white with sun-block. “Right,” he said, “who’s coming for a dip?”

2
    After dinner, the residents are shown into a small, windowless room done out in shades of blue and furnished with six chairs in a single row facing a plain oval desk with a further four chairs lined up behind it. The residents fill up the row of six, as instructed. Shiv sits between Caron and a girl called Lucy: a plump, moon-faced chatterbox, the same age as Shiv – friendly, if over-eager – who dominated the conversation (and the food) at Shiv’s end of the table during dinner. Next to Lucy is a girl whose name Shiv can’t recall, then one of the boys – the younger one. Mikey? Yes, Mikey . He must be thirteen, or he wouldn’t be here, but could pass for ten. Short and slight, twitchy with nervous energy, continually roughing his fingers through his shortish, dark-blond hair or fiercely chewing his nails.
    “OCD,” Caron whispered to her at dinner, nodding in his direction.
    At the end of the line is Docherty, who insists on being called by his surname. He looks seventeen going on twenty, with a US-army-style buzz cut and a spider’s web tattoo on his right elbow. Good-looking in a hard, getting-into-fights kind of way. He barely spoke at dinner. It was a strange meal all round, the conversation stilted, cramped by self-consciousness. They all seemed to heave a sigh of relief when it was over and the orderly who’d supervised them ushered everyone out of the dining room.
    “Shame to break up the party,” Caron muttered to Shiv on their way out.
    Shiv tried hard to keep a straight face.
    Now, as they settle into their seats in the Blue Room, a second door opens and four staff file in. Two men and a woman are in blue-and-grey uniforms, a cross between a tracksuit and something a paramedic might wear. At the rear is an older woman in a sharp grey business suit carrying a stack of buff cardboard folders.
    The uniforms sit facing the patients across the oval desk but the suit remains standing, taking up a position at one end of the desk. She sets the folders down.
    “Good evening, everyone,” she says. “And welcome to the Korsakoff Clinic.”
    She beams, arms spread in the mime of an embrace, the illumination from the spotlights in the ceiling reflecting off her glasses and giving her mannishly short, salt-and-pepper hair a silver sheen. Fifty? Sixty? Those glasses look expensively stylish; the twinkly eyes behind the lenses are the same shade of green as