Conrad & Eleanor by Jane Rogers Read Free Book Online Page A

afternoon. Did he pull her from her grave?
    The present does not erase the past. The present does not erase the past. He is surfacing. Eleanor shouldn’t have left her, she knew it, Eleanor was irresponsible. He saved Cara. He was honoured for it by El, then and after. She called it his sixth sense. There’s irony with affection and irony without. Back then, when she called it his sixth sense, it was all right. They smiled together. Only later has she made it into an insult.
    Something’s changed and his eyes snap open. The bass chatter of the headset on the boy beside him. It’s stopped; the boy is looking at him, wanting to get out. Con rises and steps into the aisle; the boy brushes past leaving his coat nested into his seat. Con checks himself in a stretch and glances furtively at his watch. Five more hours to go. People seem to be… he glances around. They are looking at him. As he meets a man’s eyes the fellow looks away, but his wife is staring, and the woman behind is staring – what is it, what has he done? Is there something behind him? He turns – nothing. Heads tilt, eyes are averted. He must be attracting their attention by his movements. They’re looking at him because he’s looking at them. He slots himself into the seat and makes himself small. All these people. The solidity of their flesh and purposes, the way they look. They look at him as if he is up to no good. They look at him with certainty, as if his lack of certainty is a disorderliness which offends them. They know where they are going and why. They eat sandwiches they have prepared earlier and wrapped in cling film; from plastic bags they extricate crisps and chocolate. They unscrew their bottles of water and flasks of coffee. They peel fruit.
    The smell when he identifies it makes sweat prickle in his armpits. Someone is eating an orange.
    His stomach convulses and he tastes the acidity at the back of his throat. Orange. It is the reek of the monkey house, of every monkey house he’s known, that sharp bitter brassy tang with undertones of piss and shit, it dries his tongue and constricts his throat. He crouches low in his seat, nose half an inch from the fabric of the seat in front, taking little shallow breaths. It is possible to ignore a smell. You get used to it. When he used to visit his nan in the home, the old woman stale pissy used up air would slug him, but after ten minutes he’d forgotten it. It is possible to ignore anything. He sits, head bowed, wrists resting inert on his thighs, holding himself very still. This is your response, he chides himself. To El. To everything. Keep very still, withhold yourself. He has spent months now, waiting, as if hiding, like a stupid creature who imagines it is camouflaged. Waiting for the danger to pass.
    Instead of getting up and dealing with it.
    Has he been imagining that there is some virtue in stoicism? That his patient endurance might move or soften her? He sees clearly now that it never would; it maddens her. How must it be for her, coming home from work, from her day of lectures and meetings and cram-packed appointments, making the effort (the sacrifice) to come home rather than going for a drink with Louis; how must it be to find him, Conrad, sitting there in the dark in the corner of the kitchen with the day’s dishes in the sink and no food prepared, staring into space? A giant reproach. A lump of self-pity. Yet – a tendril of orange stink creeps around the seat back and he jerks his head aside – yet he was not self-pitying, when he sat like that. He was simply blank. There was nothing for him to do. But she would only have been able to interpret it from her own point of view: him sitting there, offering nothing, like a plug hole, a drain into which energy and affection must be poured.
    She has never poured energy and affection into him.
    But that’s not true either. He wouldn’t have known how to deal with it