Strangled Silence by Oisin McGann Read Free Book Online Page A

Apparently he was born
arse-first. And he's been trying to catch up with it
ever since. So, were you talking to the girls? Are we
going out tonight or what?'
    Tariq gave his sister a half-hearted kick in the
backside and headed for his room. As he was climbing
the stairs he could still hear her talking:
    'He said what? God, they're all the same, aren't
they? No, I'm in between at the moment. Getting
a bit tired of boys, to be honest. They're such kids,
y'know?'
    Amina pencilled a number into the box and then
rubbed it out again, massaging her temples and
wishing her post-Saturday-night headache away.
The paracetamol did not seem to be having any
effect at all. This, combined with her bad mood, was
having severely detrimental effects on her powers of
sudoku. She and her friends had failed to get into
the Lizard Club in Leicester Square again. It was the
hottest place in town and they'd tried three times
over the last few weeks with no luck. They had
decided they were too cool for the place anyway,
and had gone somewhere else. The rejection still
stung though. How hip and gorgeous did you have
to be?
    'Journalists can learn a lot from Hitler,' Helena
declared.
    A few years ago, Amina would have risen to the
bait. It was one of her mother's trademarks to make
an outrageous statement in order to get your
attention before qualifying it with some wellreasoned
justification. Gone were the days when
Amina would react in shock at her mother's
apparent political incorrectness; now it was consigned
to the same area of disdain reserved for any
parent's attempts to be controversial, or worse yet
. . . cool. This latest declaration had been prompted
by an article in the paper in which a prominent
neo-Nazi compared the flood of Sinnostani immigrants
to the West with the Jewish 'infestation' of
Germany before the Second World War. Not long
ago, he would have been dismissed as a crackpot.
Now he had just been elected a member of parliament
in a by-election.
    'Really?' Amina asked in response to her
mother's declaration. 'Hitler bit of a newshound,
was he?'
    She winced at the trite remark. She hated being
smart with her mother, but something about
Helena always brought out the sarcasm in her.
Perhaps it was the way Helena substituted lectures
for proper mother – daughter chats. And being
hungover didn't help.
    Now she and her mother were sitting at the
kitchen table with their cups of coffee, having
divided up the Sunday paper; Amina was doing
sudoku while her mother browsed the headlines
and worked her way through the crossword. They
would read the paper through afterwards, passing
pages back and forth. This was one of the few rituals
they still shared together, mostly on Sunday afternoons,
and even though there might be hardly any
conversation at all, they both made an effort to keep
it up.
    'No,' her mother replied with a patient tone. 'I
mean he knew how to use information. He could
convince ordinary people to commit acts of
extraordinary evil.'
    'And that's exactly why I want to be a reporter,'
Amina said.
    'My, aren't we feeling sarky today!'
    'Well, I didn't catch it from the water. Can I
read that after you?'
    Helena slid the folded page over to her. Half
the articles in the paper were related to Sinnostan.
Amina thought about Ivor and his claims that the
army – or somebody connected with it – had
brainwashed him. She had dipped into the archives
to search for similar claims and had found a few,
none of which had offered any more evidence than
Ivor could himself. Amina idly wondered if there
might be something to Ivor's story, but she was sure
the truth would turn out to be something far more
mundane. The human mind had limits, and there
was no shortage of people who snapped because of
the things they'd seen, or done, or had done to
them.
    Ivor McMorris. She found herself thinking of
his sad smile, and those slightly haunted eyes.
Haunted eye, she corrected herself. Could a glass
eye have an expression? She reminded herself