Thanksgiving by Michael Dibdin Read Free Book Online Page B

whenever the emetic impulse failed, Darryl Bob must have been hurling another bodily fluid into a very different receptacle.
    Lucy would have been vociferously urging him on, I knew. She’d done it often enough with me. Sexual ecstasy doesn’t foster verbal inventiveness. There’s a limited number of things you can say in that situation, and I had a pretty good idea exactly what Lucy had said as her husband came inside her all those years ago, quite possibly while I was puking in silent misery in a shit-stained cubicle, surrounded by strangers of whom the most total was my wife.
    In this, as in so many other ways, Claire was different. I couldn’t for the life of me remember what I’d been doing at the period of her conception. My diaries of that period had gone missing, along with a lot of other things, when I moved to the States. But whatever it was, it certainly hadn’t involved making love to Lucy, watching her remove her clothes and then move towards me with that look of shy, girlish greed. Of all the things that Darryl Bob Allen had told me, that was the one that had got to me most. Like him, I’d never got used to Lucy naked. I knew every inch of her body, but each time she revealed herself to me I felt as though I’d never seen her before. I never would again now, and that enigmatic absence would haunt me for ever.
    It would also haunt our house, I realized, as soon as Claire and Frank left to go back to their respective lives after the service. I’d declined the company’s thoughtful offer, made to all those who had been intercepted and diverted to the concrete chapel in the main terminal, of a free trip to the site, plus a weekend at Disneyland in a luxury hotel with a no-limit credit card. Now I was beginning to wonder if it might not have been the best idea. Certainly I wasn’t up to spending the night at home alone, in the bed which Lucy and I had shared. In the end I moved out to the distinctly non-luxury hotel that we’d used for our early romantic trysts, before I became legitimized within the family and the nation.
    An octagonal art deco tower built in the forties and since refurbished, its rooms were all identical except for the view. I knew that, because Lucy and I had occupied at least ten of them. I didn’t know whether the room I had been allotted on this occasion was one of these or not, but I chose to believe it was. The view was certainly the same, but the one we’d stayed in one memorable weekend may have been on the next floor up or down. ‘I think you just raped me with my consent,’ she said about three in the morning of one of those nights spent making love and talking endlessly about every subject under the sun, fuelled by room service club sandwiches and a bottle of duty-free Macallan.
    The décor, which had then seemed pleasantly neutral and unobtrusive, now looked dirty, stale and depressing. On the television news, a state governor defended his decision not to stay the execution of a sixty-two-year-old great-grandmother convicted of shooting her abusive husband. She’d begged him not to kill her, he said, mimicking her frail, whiny tones, so as to spare the anguish it would cause her children and grandchildren, and then went on to affirm his personal belief in Jesus Christ and a policy of zero tolerance. In other news, a first-grader had pulled a gun and killed a six-year-old classmate after a card trade deal allegedly went wrong, and investigators announced the discovery of the flight recorder from the Seattle-bound plane which had crashed into the Pacific near Los Angeles a week earlier, killing everyone on board. Details at ten.
    Outside the hotel it was already dark, a dank rain falling on the sad, cracked, crow-infested streets. Down on the waterfront, I boarded the first outbound ferry. Even at night, the coastline was never out of sight, irregular lines of lights marking the shallow shale cliffs, the homes hunkered down amid the stunted conifers, perched precariously