Instructions for a Heatwave by Maggie O'Farrell Read Free Book Online Page B

life so easy. There one moment and not there the next. Monica had to fight the urge to look about her. Where, where had the cat gone? It must be here somewhere. It couldn’t have just vanished like that.
    Aoife, strangely, surfaced in her mind again. Grown up, now, no longer in school socks. In the hospital that time: Aoife leaning over the dish, before the nurse came to take it away.
    Monica bowed her head, wanting to shake the cat, to rouse it back to life, desperate for it to stretch out its paws and claw at her sleeve. You’d have thought such a passing would involve a struggle, a fight, a battle between states. But perhaps not. Perhaps it was always such a drift, such a slide.
    Terrible to think it could happen with such ease.
    It was Aoife who had leaned over and looked in the dish. She, Monica, had said: Oh, don’t, Aoife, it’s bad luck. But Aoife hadn’t listened, of course. She’d looked at it for a long time.
    Monica kept her fingers under the cat’s jaw, which was fragile as a wishbone; the other hand touched the fur behind the cat’sear, the very softest fur of all, she’d always thought, impossibly soft, like dandelion down.
    How quickly it had happened, Aoife growing up. It seemed to Monica that one day Aoife was a child, with dragging shoelaces and plaits that undid themselves, and the next, she was a woman with draped clothes and numerous necklaces, standing beside Monica’s hospital bed, not listening when she’d said: Aoife, don’t look. Her hair slid over her face so Monica couldn’t read her expression. A long time it was that she looked. And then she said, in a low sort of voice: It died before it could even live. And she, Monica, sitting up in the bed, had banged her fist on her knee and said, No, not at all. It had lived. She had felt it live, for all those weeks. Felt its presence running through her veins, felt its existence undeniably in the odd dizziness of the mornings, in the nausea induced by cigarettes and exhaust fumes and furniture polish. It had lived, she’d said to her sister. Aoife raised her head then and said, Of course it did, I’m sorry, Mon, I’m so sorry.
    It would have been almost three, that child.
    There was no use in thinking these things. Monica took her hands off the cat’s body. She turned away. She blew her nose. She pulled her bag higher onto her shoulder. She thanked the vet. She paid at the reception desk. She took the cardboard box, which felt peculiarly light (was it the soul, she wondered, that carried all the weight?). She went out onto the pavement. She looked up and down the high street for a moment. She walked to the bus stop.
    Back at the house, Monica went around opening the windows. Let some air in, for God’s sake. But there seemed to be no air, inside or out. Heat seemed to reach in through the narrow gaps, like smoke under a door. Monica slammed the windows shut again, dabbed some cologne on her wrists, her temples, redid her hair. Gretta and Aoife had thick hair that grew in all directions but hers was gossamer-thin, straight as straight, oncepale but now a kind of washed-out mouse. There was nothing to be done with it. Just have it set at the hairdresser’s every week and use a net at night.
    Monica strode across the landing and into the bathroom. She looked around her wildly, ripped some tissue paper off its roll, pressed it to her nose. Her throat was raw and sore—hay fever, maybe?—her eyes smarting. She flung the tissue paper down the loo and began to pull at the zip on her dress. She had to freshen herself for Peter, who would be home soon; it was important to keep your husband interested, everyone said that.
    She was going to have a bath. Yes, she was.
    She didn’t care about the bloody water ban—she needed a bath, she had to have one. To hell with the government and their miserly quotas, to hell with everyone. She pushed in the plug and opened both taps. Water gushed forth. She was, for a moment, mesmerized by the sight of it,