Sleight of Hand by Nick Alexander Read Free Book Online

death of cold.”
    Jenny looks up at me and wobbles her head in a drunken gesture of acquiescence. I drape the coat over her shoulders.
    â€œWhat happened to your finger?” I ask, noting a fresh, bloody plaster.
    â€œShlicing frozen lemons,” she says. “With the ham slicer.” She sounds plastered.
    I pull a face as I imagine the scene.
    â€œI’m sorry about Tom,” she says. “He’s just a baby really.”
    I nod and take a seat next to her. “Yes, I know.”
    â€œYou broke his heart though,” she says.
    â€œYeah. Well … he didn’t do much for mine,” I reply.
    Jenny raises an eyebrow and stares me in the eye for the first time today. “Don’t go there,” she says. “Really. Not with me. Don’t dare.”
    â€œNo,” I say. “Sorry.”
    â€œThat was an awful thing you … Really.”
    â€œI’m sorry. It wasn’t meant, if that makes any difference.”
    â€œWhat does that mean?” she asks. “It wasn’t
meant?”
    I shrug. “Sorry, even I don’t know.”
    â€œNo,” she says, thoughtfully. “It
is
cold,” she says, standing, and then reaching out to steady herself on the arm of the chair. “I didn’t notice really.”
    â€œHow many of those have you had?”
    â€œThree. Four, maybe. This tastes disgusting though,” she says, emptying the drink on the grass. “What did you put in it?”
    â€œNothing. Vodka. Tonic. Have you eaten anything?”
    â€œYes, I …” she says, then freezes. She remains totally immobile, staring at me, and then her eyes slip out of focus until she’s looking
through
me. I notice that her left arm is trembling slightly.
    â€œGod you
are
cold,” I say. “Come inside.”
    And then a freaky thing happens. Her eyes roll upwards until I can no longer see the pupils.
    â€œJenny?!”
    Her hand slips from the arm of the chair, and I lurch to catch her as she crumples to the ground.

Jenny: Catch Me When I Fall
    I couldn’t decide whether to hit Mark or hug him. That was my main dilemma. I was feeling raw and emotional, and yet numb and dreamy all at once. My mother was dead and Tom was rabbiting on about some guy he had just met and how he
lived
at the gym which was reassuring I suppose in a
life-goes-on
kind of way. I was part-listening to Tom but mainly I was lost in my own thoughts about whether I should have brought Sarah along to her gran’s funeral. She seemed too young to face death to me – I had wanted to protect her. But I was thinking now that I had only put off the inevitable. She would be back at the house soon enough, and I would have to start explaining where her gran was. Or lying.
    We both turned around. I don’t remember why, but Tom and I both turned around at the same moment, and there he was looking tanned and scared. And my reflex was to bitch-slap him so hard that he would have fallen over. Or to reach out and hug him. I just couldn’t decide which.
    Tom’s presence, his crackling anger, didn’t seem to leave the space required for me to work it out. So I did nothing. I just gaped, I think.
    My mum was my last family member to go. I once had a brother, Frederic, Freddy, Fred, his name got shorter as the years went by until it vanished all together. He had a motorbike accident when he was eighteen. I was eleven. He died, as they say, instantly.
    Dad died a couple of years afterwards. Mum always says … she always
said
he died of sorrow, but he didn’t – he died of kidney failure.
    And now Mum. She wasn’t supposed to go yet. There had been no hint of it. She was one of those super-grannies you see whizzing around, shopping, gardening, walking … Most of the time, she had more energy than me. I honestly thought she would go on forever.
    One day she went to Waitrose and when she got back, at the moment she carried the bag