Shadows & Tall Trees by Michael Kelly Read Free Book Online Page B

looking through one pane and then through another. Trying to work out what the trick was. How one piece of the window could show one view, the other, something else. I’m afraid I must have looked rather like an idiot.
    And I tried to open the window. I wanted to see the garden without the prism of the glass to distract me, I wanted to know what was real and what was not. The catch wouldn’t give. It seemed to freeze beneath my fingers.
    Then there was a knock at my door.
    It brought me back to myself; rather, it wasn’t until then that I realized it, that I was on the verge of hysteria, or panic at the very least. I don’t know whether I had cried out. I thought I had been silent all this while, but perhaps I had cried out. I had woken the house. I was ashamed. I forced myself to turn from the window, and as I did so, with it at my back, I felt like myself again. I smoothed down my pyjamas. I went to open the door. I prepared to apologize.
    Lisa was outside in a white night dress. She came in without my inviting her to do so, smiled, sat upon my bed.
    “Hello, John,” she whispered.
    I said hello back at her.
    “Did you never want children of your own? I’m curious.”
    She began unbuttoning her night dress then. I decided I really shouldn’t look at what she was doing, but I didn’t want to look through the window again either, so I settled on a compromise, I stared at a wholly inoffensive wardrobe door. I said something about not really liking children, and that the opportunity to discover otherwise was never much likely to present itself. I was aware, too, that something was very odd about her arrival and the ensuing conversation, but you must understand, it still seemed like a welcome respite from the absurdities I had glimpsed through my bedroom window.
    She seemed to accept my answer, and then said, “Would you help me, please?” Her head disappeared into the neck of the night dress, its now loose arms were flailing. I gave it a tug and pulled the dress off over her head. “Thank you,” she said. She smiled, turned, pointed these two bare breasts straight at me.
    “What do you think?” she asked. “Are they better than you were expecting?” I endeavoured to explain that I had had no expectations of her breasts at all. She tittered at that, just as she had when she’d curtseyed to me in the driveway; it was a silly sound. “They’re new,” she said, and I supposed that made sense, they seemed too mirror perfect to be real, they seemed
sculpted
. And they didn’t yet match the colour of her chest, they were white and pristine.
    I wanted to ask her about the view through the window, but it seemed suddenly rather impolite to change the subject. What I did ask, though, was whether she was quite sure she had the right bedroom? Didn’t she want the one with her husband in it? And at this her face fell.
    “Max hasn’t told you, has he?”
    I said that he hadn’t, no.
    “Oh God,” she said. “Bloody Max. This is what we. . . This is why. God. He’s supposed to tell. Why else do you think he brought you here?”
    I said that we were old friends, and at that she screwed up her face in contempt, and it made her rather ugly. I suggested that maybe he wanted to show me the house and the garden.
    “Max hates the fucking house and garden,” said Lisa. “He’d leave it all tomorrow if he could.” She grabbed at her night dress, struggled with it. “Bloody Max. I’m very sorry. We have an agreement. I don’t know what he’s playing at. This is the way
I
cope.” She couldn’t get her arms in the right holes, she began to cry.
    I said I was sorry. I asked her whether she could hear running water anywhere, was it just me?
    “I’ve always liked you, John,” she said. “Can’t you like me just a little bit?”
    I said I did like her, a little bit. More than, even.
    “Can’t you like me for one night?”
    I tried asking her about Max, but she just shook her head, and now she was smiling