The Paper Eater by Liz Jensen Read Free Book Online Page A

the Odeon once a week. Buy her flowers that came from a proper florist’s. Stop trying to muscle in on her relationship with her daughter.
    Geoff’s stress-management consultancy didn’t strike me as a particularly professional service. His bookshelves werestuffed with creepy self-improvement manuals, and he banged on zealously about a weed called St John’s wort, ‘for moods’.
    What I couldn’t get through to Geoff was the idea that there was nothing wrong with being loyal to your original family, and enjoying their company. I told him how fantastic Mum was: how well she’d always cooked, how much she loved me. I told him about Dad, and what a great, straight guy he’d been, full of sound advice to a boy growing up. About Uncle Sid, always game for a laugh. About how clever Cameron was, and how Lola had the boys falling over themselves because of her animal magnetism.
    But like Gwynneth, Mr Stress seemed to have a blind spot about the whole subject.
    Atlantica, Atlantica .
    The next nightmare’s even worse. Me, Mum, Dad, Sid, Lola and Cameron, we’re at Liberty Head Office, walking down corridors and up escalators, searching for a certain woman. I have to see her again, I have things to tell her, things I couldn’t say when we were together, because there wasn’t time and I didn’t have the words, things about how if only we could’ve had a shot at living a normal life, as normal as you can when you’re people like us, who have trouble saying things, so much trouble that it’s only in your head you can do it … But the words get mangled up and the corridors go on for ever and –
    – Wait!
    My sister Lola has stopped in her tracks. She turns to face us.
    – I know where she is! she says. We’ve been looking in the wrong place! Hannah Park doesn’t work here any more.
    – So where is she? I go.
    As I wake, a freezing wave slaps across my heart and I remember the pure white concrete of the crater.
    * * *
    – Bad night then? asks John, after Fishook has tannoyed his morning message. The Swedish music is sweeping through us like a chilly wind. – You were talking in your sleep, you were.
    – I’ll sleepwalk next, I warned him. Come and strangle you. I’d have indemnity. I read an article about it. You can do anything you like, if you’re unconscious.
    – You were saying someone’s name, he goes. It sounded like Park.
    – It wasn’t a name then, I said quickly, busking it. It was about parking.
    He looked doubtful.
    – I have two types of dream, I said. Sky dreams, which are about flying through the sky with my family, and dreams about parking. Which are about parking.
    That seemed to satisfy him.
    Later in the day, he said – Multi-storey, or kerbside? and I said – Both.
    You try to paralyse your brain with chewing, keep things on an even keel, but then something comes along, and you can’t. Like now. The news of our return to Atlantica I could have handled. But on top of it John’s execution, and the letter, and then a certain woman nightmaring her way back –
    Well, there are limits, aren’t there. So I’m helter-skeltering to Dr Pappadakis now. I’m not the first to request a visit. He’s seeing Atlanticans at five-minute intervals. As Garcia opens the door to let me out I try to avoid looking at his chunky jaw, his long front teeth.
    – You stay walk on red line, he says. Or I no hesitate shoot, hokay?
    On the way to the surgery, Garcia follows five paces behind like a traditional Japanese wife, apart from the stun-gun. As I pass the mirror on the poop, I catch sight of a squat, balding grey man. It’s always a shock seeing the colour. Like concrete. It’s as if my skin’s dyed from the inside. Idrag my eyes away, but not before noting that my face has changed shape since I last saw it. My cheeks have become so muscular they now look like the buttocks of a male ballet dancer. I shudder. Bulging spheres in grey tights. Swan Lake. My tongue is black.
    – Your entire epidermis,