The Sacrificial Man by Ruth Dugdall Read Free Book Online

gaze.
“How old is she?” I’ve never been good at guessing the ages of children, it’s not a skill that interests me.
She hesitates, “We’re not here to talk about me, Alice.”
I look again at the photo. The girl looks about the same age I was when my world shattered. Cate hands me the smeared glass of water, and turns to her computer. I note the slight dilation of her pupils as she realises what she left on the screen. Her notes of our meeting yesterday, which I’ve read. I’m a fast reader, all those essays I’ve marked over the years. She moves her mouse, and the screen blanks.
I sip water, still looking at the photo. Cate touches the frame again, turning the picture further out of my line of vision. “I’d like to ask about the degree to which you and David Jenkins planned his death. There was obviously a great deal of premeditation?”
I let there be a pause, and remember the choice she gave me when we last met. The option of talking to her, to avoid prison. But I don’t want her victory to be so easy, and keep silent for a moment longer. Her eyes flicker with uncertainty. She doesn’t yet know if I will talk.
I say eventually, “Yes. There was.”
Glad of the drink, I lean back in the low chair, and Cate swivels so she faces me, but at an angle. The desk is against the wall so there is no barrier between us, except for any words that might get in the way. She lifts her pen to the paper. It’s my prompt to begin. And I’ve made a decision. I decide I have no choice; I decide to talk, but in my own way, choosing my own place to begin.
Cate Austin asks too many questions, and I must be careful. Soon she’ll ask about the cutting of flesh, the tasting. It’s difficult to explain, easier for me to go further back, to another story. She needs to understand where I come from, why love is so fragile. I’ll tell my story, and hope that she understands. My freedom depends on it.
I tell her this:
Although there was a lot to think about before Smith’s death, I was concerned about my parents. I thought it must be possible to prepare them in some way, as carefully as the situation would allow. If I could speak with them, before the event, then it would surely help them cope when Smith was dead and I was in the media limelight.
     
It was April last year, just after Mother’s Day but before Easter. I’d known Smith for two months. In just two more he would be dead.
I didn’t want my parents discovering our conspiracy from some media headline. To find out from a newspaper article that their daughter had assisted a suicide would be horrible, and I hoped to ready them. I knew they would never understand the passion to which Smith and I aspired. The act we were planning would seize the perfect moment, the most exquisite high. Forever captured. My parents lived their ordinary lives without extreme emotion, in a space that had no warmth. No love was left, yet they remained, like two indifferent animals in the same cage. Had they never thought of escape? Had neither of them imagined an alternative?
My love affair with Smith would be beyond their comprehension. Just as I had always been. If they’d taken just the slightest nip of time to understand… but that was how they lived. Change is hard. And they lived their lives between emotions, in the safety of hearts stabilised by beta-blockers.
I chose a different way. What was happening between Smith and myself, our evolving symmetry, was more real than art, than books, than all I knew before he came to me. Smith was my answer. Our journey was just beginning but even then I was practical, pulled down by the weight of tedious detail. And one of these was the pressing issue of my parents’ inevitable discovery. I had to pre-warn them.
They rarely occupied the same room and I was forced to speak with them separately. I started with my father. This was the interview I dreaded least. It was a Sunday, and we’d just eaten lunch. For as long as I can remember Dad has eaten