The Crooked House by Christobel Kent Read Free Book Online Page A

said, sadly, ‘Your brain’s protecting itself, I expect. It … it may change.’
    The therapist never promised anything, Alison noticed that, as if she might get sued, and she never gave advice either. Always little tentative suggestions – it was one of the reasons Alisonstopped believing in her. Take up swimming, drawing, walking. The situation seemed to her to require something more extreme, not sensible civilised suggestions. It wanted some violent and dangerous therapy: jumping off high buildings with a rope around you or that kind of deep-water diving where you go down to the limits of your lung capacity and pass out. Or total denial.
    Gina had looked nothing like Kay. Strong-willed and bold, she’d been tall and well-developed, breasts and everything at fourteen, too big for the crowded mess of the small terraced house where she lived with her father. When she was eleven her mother had left them for another man and her dad worked on the cargo boats, running freight around the coast for days at a time, Ipswich to Gravesend, mostly sand, he once told Esme, coming in glassy-eyed with the booze and uncharacteristically forthcoming. Esme generally steered clear when he was home. He worked sober, then drank when he came back. Social services were kept in the dark and Gina fed herself with money he’d dish out to her every couple of weeks. ‘He’s all right,’ was all she’d say of her father. ‘Better than being in care.’ Esme’s mother made noises but she never told on Gina.
    Gina did badly at school: she could hardly write, Alison happened to know. She simply wasn’t interested: partly a matter of hating every authority figure, every teacher, on principle; partly a matter of recklessness. But she wasn’t stupid.
    In the dream Gina was running, out along the horizon towards the little church, fast and fearless. She was running away, and Alison was behind her. They reached the end of the spit where the marsh dissolved into shingle and mud but Gina didn’t stop, Alison fought through the mud after her and into the grey tide where they twined around each other, down under the surface. Under the water Gina’s eyes were open. She spoke, bubbles rising from her pale lips in the clouded water.‘He’s still there,’ she said. ‘It’s still there.’ And her face wavered, shifted in the water: it was Kay, it was Gina. It was someone else, someone she couldn’t name.
    Alison woke up.
    It was eight by her mobile, and Paul was coming for her at nine. He’d never been to her place before: she looked around, trying to see it through his eyes. A little bolthole for a scared rabbit. Where once it had been an untidy burrow heaped with crumpled clothes and piled books, now it looked neurotically neat. She sighed and got out of bed. So far her suitcase only contained the slip, still folded in its dark tissue. On impulse she dropped her trainers in on top, and a sports bra, but the dark red still glowed.
    Kay had been impressed. ‘He actually took the trouble to find out what you wanted?’ she’d said, eyebrows up under her chopped fringe. ‘He didn’t just buy you a bit of scratchy red tat?’ And shrugged. ‘I suppose that’s cool.’
    She’d told Kay about the gun, too; her eyes had widened. ‘Jesus.’ Then she’d gone quiet for a bit and finally had shrugged, unwillingly. ‘Second World War’s his thing? Men, though. Collecting gas masks and that stuff. A bit weird, if you ask me.’ They’d laughed.
    Dodging the issue of the wedding outfit she put in jeans, a shirt, a jersey, thinking, there’ll be wind off the sea, feeling memory press against her. A swimsuit. She held it up, frowning, and something happened, the feel of the water from her dream and from further back flooded her senses. The memory of swimming out in the estuary off someone’s battered little dinghy, out by the power station’s cooling wall and the water marvellously, unnaturally warm.
    And suddenly a face – broad, serious, a