Sex and Death by Sarah Hall Read Free Book Online Page A

laugh.
    â€˜Oh, you are, George,’ said Pattern. ‘Here you are. In my life right now. Closer to me than anyone else on the planet.’
    â€˜You know what I mean. How can I reach you?’ He didn’t particularly want to say goodbye to her.
    â€˜I always know where you are, Georgie. I do. Trust me.’
    â€˜But I don’t know that. I don’t really feel that. It doesn’t feel like you’re even out there. When you’re not here it’s like you never were here at all.’
    â€˜No, no,’ she whispered. ‘I don’t believe that. That’s not true.’
    â€˜Is something going to happen to you? I don’t know what to believe.’
    â€˜Well,’ she said. ‘Something already has. Something has happened to all of us, right?’
    â€˜Please don’t make a joke or be clever, Elizabeth. I can’t stand it. There’s nobody left but you. What if I don’t see you again? What will I do?’
    â€˜Oh Georgie, I am right here. I am right here with you now.’
    *
    George kept quiet about his sister in therapy. He talked about everything else. But sometimes he’d catch Dr Graco studying him, and he’d think that perhaps she knew. She didn’t need to be told. She might not grasp the specific details, the bare facts – who and when and what and all those things that did not matter – but it seemed to George that she could see, or was starting to, that someone out there was seeing him, watching him. That someone really knew him and that, whatever else you could say about him, it was clear that he was no longer really alone.
    At home George listened, and hoped, and waited, but his phone never made the strange tone again. He found nothing on his sister in the news, though he looked. Whoever had been calling for her blood had gone quiet. And here George couldn’t decide if their silence meant that they’d lost interest, or that they had her, they got her, and Pattern was gone.
    One night it was late and he’d let his uncertainty overpower him. It had been a year since he’d seen her. Where was she? How could she just disappear? He’d been saving up his idea for a moment just like this one, so he sat down at his desk and wrote his sister an email.
    Elizabeth –
    Is it just me now, or are you still out there? Don’t write back. I cannot imagine how busy you must be! There is a lot that I cannot imagine. But that’s okay, right? You’re out there looking, I know. I am waving at you, wherever you are. I am down here saying hello. I love you very much.
    Your brother,
    George

FIXATIONS
    Ceridwen Dovey
    As is the way of the body, when things are going right, we are allowed to remain blissfully unaware of the fact that we are housed in sheaths of flesh. When things go wrong, however, worse than the pain, worse even than the shame, is no longer being able to ignore the body’s relentless systems of audit and account: things go in, things come out, things go in, things come out, over and over and over until we die. Selene lay awake at night between feeds, fantasising about how she was going to take her body for granted again when this was all over – she was going to abuse the hell out of it, eat trans fat galore, drink buckets of booze, show her body who was boss, that it had no right to hold her hostage like this.
    It wasn’t the baby – though of course that had been the ultimate proof of the nature of how things go in and then come out – nor was it the breastfeeding. These processes were celebrations of the body, or at least celebrations of the higher functions of the body.
    The crude bodily problem keeping her awake most nights, and in agony at least once a day, was not directly related to birthing a baby, though nobody seemed to believe her when she said that the birth itself had been a piece of cake, relaxed, downright enjoyable, compared to this. She could no longer go to