Kethani by Eric Brown Read Free Book Online

would react with indignation and fright, or even report me.
    “If there’s anything I can do to help...” I said. Did she realise, in her teenage wisdom, that my words were just as much a cry for help as an offer of the same?
    She smiled brightly, filling me with relief. “Thanks, Mr. Morrow. It’s nice to be able to talk to someone.” She climbed out and waved to me with a mittened hand before setting off down the farm track.
    That night I set out to get seriously drunk. I placed three bottles of claret on the coffee table before the fire and sat in the darkness and drank. I would be lying if I claimed that I was trying to banish the painful memories of Caroline that Claudine stirred in me. More truthfully, I wanted to banish the knowledge of the failure I had become through inaction and fear. A lonely man has the capacity for self-pity so much greater than his ability, or desire, to change the circumstances that brought about such self-pity in the first place.
    I was drinking because I realised the futility of trying to seek solace and companionship from a mixed-up eighteen year-old schoolgirl.

    I awoke late the following day, lost myself in a book for a couple of hours, and later that afternoon watched the live match on television. Leeds had a returnee playing up front, but after the year’s lay off he had yet to find his previous form, and the game ended in a dull nil-nil draw. At six, as a new snowfall created a pointillistic flurry in the darkness outside, I started on the half bottle of claret remaining from the night before.
    I was contemplating another drunken evening when I heard a call from outside and seconds later a frenzied banging on the front door.
    Claudine stood on the doorstep, wet, bedraggled, and frozen. She began as soon as I pulled open the door, “She has fallen and hit her head. The lines are down and I can’t call the ambulance. We don’t have a mobile.”
    “Slow down,” I said, taking her hand and pulling her across the threshold. “Who’s fallen?”
    “My mother. She was drinking. She fell down the stairs. She is unconscious.”
    She was wearing a thin anorak, a short skirt, and incongruously bulky moon-boots. Her legs were bare and whipped red from the frozen wind.
    “I’ve a mobile somewhere.” I hurried into the lounge, dug through the cushions of the settee for the phone, and called an ambulance.
    Claudine watched me, teeth chattering. With her hair plastered to her forehead, and her bare knees knocking, she looked about twelve years old.
    I took her hand, hurried her from the house to my car. She sat in silence as I drove past the reservoir and turned down the track to her house.
    She had left the front door wide open in her haste to summon help. I rushed inside. “In the lounge,” Claudine said. “Through there.”
    The lounge was a split-level affair, with three steps leading from the higher level to a spacious area with a picture window overlooking the water. Claudine’s mother sprawled across the floor, having tumbled and struck her head on the edge of a wrought-iron coffee table. She was a thin, tanned woman with bleached-blonde hair. In her unconscious features I saw the likeness of Claudine, thirty years on.
    The reek of whisky, spilt from the glass she had been carrying, filled the room.
    I rolled her onto her side and did my best to staunch the flow of blood from her forehead, noticing as I did so that she, unlike her daughter, was implanted.
    The ambulance arrived fifteen minutes later. The paramedics examined Claudine’s mother, then eased her onto a stretcher. I watched them load her into the back of the vehicle, my arm around Claudine. One of the medics asked Claudine if she wanted to accompany her mother in the ambulance.
    “I’ll take her in the car,” I said before she had time to reply.
    The ambulance backed up the track and raced, blue light flashing, down the lane into town. I made for the car.
    Behind me, Claudine said, “I don’t want to