coin, I’ll know.’
After she hangs up, I sit for a moment with the phone warm in my hand. I imagine the soundwaves that have pumped through the air, threaded between the molecules of the metal of my car, vibrated along the street where they’ve joined up with more soundwaves from other phones that flood across the whole city, an invisible lattice, a web of messages. And what are these earth-shattering missives, enabled by squillions of dollars and countless hours spent developing this technology?
Do we have any pesto
and
I’m on the train
and
Don’t forget to tape
Sex and the City.
I think back to when we were small, to our teenage years and our twenties. If anyone asks, I always say
this twin business in nonsense.
Or
if I had a psychic connection to my sister, believe me, I’d know—don’t ask me how, I’d just know.
Or
you pronounced ‘psychotic’ wrong.
All those things she seemed to know: that time I broke my arm playing soccer and rang home and couldn’t get Mum because she had taken Charlotte to the hospital with a mysterious pain in the same arm. Or that time at uni I’d broken up with the boy I thought was
the one,
and came home to find she’d stocked the freezer with five different flavours of ice-cream.
Coincidence and the power of suggestion, fairy stories for weak-minded people. A complete load of rubbish.
The address in Violet’s file is a flat in Kew—beige neo-Edwardian slash faux-Georgian with black wroughtiron gates and no eaves and ivy trained up the front wall. I’ve driven around the block twice but I can’t get any closer so I park and scoff a tiny Mars Bar I found in the glove compartment. You need a magnifying glass and tweezers to eat a Mars Bar these days, thanks to those multi-national bastard companies and their cynical profit-mongering diminution of formerly normal-sized confectionery.
I had no choice. I had to come here. If I call and convince her to return the coin, I won’t see it for another week. Dad will realise it’s gone by then. Mum will smile and say,
Stanzi. Dear. Do you think you should have let Charlotte do it? We know how busy you are.
Which is Motherian for
your sister loves us more than you do, and what’s more, you’re a bad daughter.
Or maybe he already knows it’s gone. Mum’s hopeless with secrets. Or worse: the doctors are wrong and the pacemaker doesn’t work. This won’t be much of a get-well present if he doesn’t last long enough to get it.
At the front door, I’m in luck. A pizza delivery guy has been buzzed in and he holds the door open so I don’t have to declare myself over the intercom. We go up in the lift and all I can smell is pepperoni and melted cheese, oily and sharp and utterly compelling. Pizza smell is like radioactive waste: it’sprobably seeped into the fabric of my clothes and I’ll have to dry-clean everything, otherwise every time I wear this outfit I’ll be starving. It’s after seven and I’ve had nothing but a banana and a skim latte, then a muffin at eleven. It’s all right for mung-bean Charlotte. I have an efficient metabolism. Back in the cave, she would have been dead halfway through the first hard winter. The pizza guy gets out of the lift alive, with the box. He doesn’t know how lucky he is.
I follow him along the tasteful corridor to Violet’s apartment. Violet and pizza does not make sense. I hang back in a non-threatening manner and catch my breath but, when the door opens, it isn’t her. It’s a man in his early forties, short hair greying at the temples. He’s in excellent shape; he stands the way fit people do, like their muscles could keep their body erect all by themselves, no bones required. I see sinews taut at the front of his throat. People who work out are so gullible. They think they’ll live longer. Well, good luck to them. It’s a shame most of them aren’t bright enough to realise that the extra time added to their life when they’re eighty and too old to do anything
After she hangs up, I sit for a moment with the phone warm in my hand. I imagine the soundwaves that have pumped through the air, threaded between the molecules of the metal of my car, vibrated along the street where they’ve joined up with more soundwaves from other phones that flood across the whole city, an invisible lattice, a web of messages. And what are these earth-shattering missives, enabled by squillions of dollars and countless hours spent developing this technology?
Do we have any pesto
and
I’m on the train
and
Don’t forget to tape
Sex and the City.
I think back to when we were small, to our teenage years and our twenties. If anyone asks, I always say
this twin business in nonsense.
Or
if I had a psychic connection to my sister, believe me, I’d know—don’t ask me how, I’d just know.
Or
you pronounced ‘psychotic’ wrong.
All those things she seemed to know: that time I broke my arm playing soccer and rang home and couldn’t get Mum because she had taken Charlotte to the hospital with a mysterious pain in the same arm. Or that time at uni I’d broken up with the boy I thought was
the one,
and came home to find she’d stocked the freezer with five different flavours of ice-cream.
Coincidence and the power of suggestion, fairy stories for weak-minded people. A complete load of rubbish.
The address in Violet’s file is a flat in Kew—beige neo-Edwardian slash faux-Georgian with black wroughtiron gates and no eaves and ivy trained up the front wall. I’ve driven around the block twice but I can’t get any closer so I park and scoff a tiny Mars Bar I found in the glove compartment. You need a magnifying glass and tweezers to eat a Mars Bar these days, thanks to those multi-national bastard companies and their cynical profit-mongering diminution of formerly normal-sized confectionery.
I had no choice. I had to come here. If I call and convince her to return the coin, I won’t see it for another week. Dad will realise it’s gone by then. Mum will smile and say,
Stanzi. Dear. Do you think you should have let Charlotte do it? We know how busy you are.
Which is Motherian for
your sister loves us more than you do, and what’s more, you’re a bad daughter.
Or maybe he already knows it’s gone. Mum’s hopeless with secrets. Or worse: the doctors are wrong and the pacemaker doesn’t work. This won’t be much of a get-well present if he doesn’t last long enough to get it.
At the front door, I’m in luck. A pizza delivery guy has been buzzed in and he holds the door open so I don’t have to declare myself over the intercom. We go up in the lift and all I can smell is pepperoni and melted cheese, oily and sharp and utterly compelling. Pizza smell is like radioactive waste: it’sprobably seeped into the fabric of my clothes and I’ll have to dry-clean everything, otherwise every time I wear this outfit I’ll be starving. It’s after seven and I’ve had nothing but a banana and a skim latte, then a muffin at eleven. It’s all right for mung-bean Charlotte. I have an efficient metabolism. Back in the cave, she would have been dead halfway through the first hard winter. The pizza guy gets out of the lift alive, with the box. He doesn’t know how lucky he is.
I follow him along the tasteful corridor to Violet’s apartment. Violet and pizza does not make sense. I hang back in a non-threatening manner and catch my breath but, when the door opens, it isn’t her. It’s a man in his early forties, short hair greying at the temples. He’s in excellent shape; he stands the way fit people do, like their muscles could keep their body erect all by themselves, no bones required. I see sinews taut at the front of his throat. People who work out are so gullible. They think they’ll live longer. Well, good luck to them. It’s a shame most of them aren’t bright enough to realise that the extra time added to their life when they’re eighty and too old to do anything
Similar Books
