Aerogrammes by Tania James Read Free Book Online Page A

opposite wall. Neneh was kneeling on the other side. Henry no longer moved with a limp, but it seemed to her that hisspirit had atrophied, sucked from his frame. She wondered if he thought he was being punished. She raised her hand and waved, a gesture he used to mirror, but now did not.
    “Looks like he’s in one of his moods,” Ben said. He tugged at the bill of his baseball cap and gazed at Henry with disinterest. “No one can talk him out of a funk.”
    Neneh kept insisting on her privacy, so Ben moved away to sweep an empty cage within shouting distance. “Just don’t get too comfy with him. He’s still a wild animal. He might not remember old friends.”
    She turned back to Henry, worried that he had detected the irritation in her voice, but he was avoiding her eyes in favor of the fruit cup. He seemed not to recognize her, despite the red headband, and for a time, there was only the scrape of Ben’s broom.
    Henry took up the fruit cup. His fingers, long and slim and thick-knuckled, moved with all the care and precision of an old man’s, as if the object might jump from his hands if he didn’t handle it deliberately. He found the peel-back flap on the lid and opened it as Pearl had taught him to do, an act so perfect, so familiar, that Neneh had trouble containing her smile behind her hand. He drank the syrup first, and she almost laughed when he scooped out a yellow wedge of pineapple with a single finger; Henry always mined the pineapples first. Without hesitation, she reached an open palm through the bars, just as she used to do when asking him to share. Henry put down the fruit cup and watched her hand coming toward him.
    With a lunge, he took hold of her wrist so quickly she almost cried out. His grip was frightening in its power and assurance; her bones and tendons were no more than flower stems in his fist.
    “Henry, stop,” she said quietly, “it’s me …” But his lips remained sealed, his gaze cold and impassive. Was this the same face that had winced when the trunk door fell on her head? And didn’t he rub his crown just as she rubbed her own? She had collected those memories like precious stones, kept them all these years. Hadn’t he?
    But his grip did not tighten or loosen, and she began to wonder if he was holding her there for a reason. Perhaps he was testing her, to see whether he could trust her as before, or whether she feared him and would squirm free of his clasp. She made herself as still as possible. She flexed her forearm and closed her fist as if to transmit her steadiness, her strength, the solid resolve of a promise, until a distant yell came bearing down on them both: “Henry, let go! … 
NO, HENRY, NO!
”
    Ben rapped his broomstick against the bars. Henry flinched but didn’t let go until Ben whacked the bars again, harder this time. Shrieking, Henry scrabbled across the cage to the farthest wall. “Wait,” Neneh said, almost to herself, and before she realized what she was doing, she had sprung up and wrenched the broomstick from Ben’s hands.
    “What the hell,” he began to say, but stopped short, silenced by her wild, rage-reddened face.
    “Leave him alone,” she said hoarsely, in a low, raw voice, as if she’d been shouting for days, years. Ben stood there, staring. “Just leave us the fuck alone!”
    Ben backed away, palms raised. “Okay. I’m leaving.”
    Dropping the broom, she fell to her knees by the cage and reached her arm through the bars, calling to Henry, coaxing, begging even. No matter how she beckoned, Henry would not come. He had turned away from her, a watery blur of black, and all she could do was trace the air with her finger, the question mark curve of his spine.
    Somewhere, behind her, Ben was muttering into his walkie-talkie. She knew they wouldn’t let her return. She wrapped her hands around the bars and held fast to the only thing that could keep her intact, the remembrance of last night’s dream, wherein Henry was being chased