Thin Air by Storm Constantine Page A

dear!’
    Gina wrinkled her nose. ‘Hardly.
It’s only a small publisher, but what the hell. It’s a
start.’ Gina had been working on her novel ever since Jay had met
her. Although Jay felt it had the potential to be a cult success,
she’d privately doubted its rather aggressive approach could ever
ensure wide sales. Gina described it as a cross between Hollywood
Wives and An American Psycho. Shopping, fucking and gutting and
outrageously politically incorrect. Jay wasn’t squeamish but some
of the chapters had still made her wince. Perhaps it would be a
best-seller after all.
    Gina sprinkled a little packet
of sugar into her coffee. ‘So, what’s happening with you? I had a
sense of some kind of ‘happening’ in your voice last night.’
    Jay wriggled her shoulders
uncomfortably. What she had to say didn’t match Gina’s mood. ‘Oh,
it’s nothing really. Paranoia, I expect.’
    Gina took off her dark glasses,
eyes like lasers. ‘What?’
    Jay’s eyes swerved away. ‘Did
you see the documentary about Dex on TV the other night?’
    Gina looked slightly
embarrassed. ‘Yes. Dan and I watched it. It was bollocks, of
course.’ She reached out a hand to touch Jay’s fingers, which were
unaccountably icy. ‘Oh, it’s upset you, hasn’t it. I
understand...’
    Jay raised her hands and Gina’s
fingers curled away from her. ‘Not exactly. Well, yes. No. Oh God,
this is going to sound mad, and I want you to be clear that I’m not
mad, but there’ve been some odd... coincidences since Sunday
night.’
    It had begun with the magazine.
The outburst with Gus had been a mistake, because it had given him
evidence that Jay was still screwed up about Dex. Still, she
couldn’t take that back now. The next day had simmered with a
low-burn brew of hostile hurt. Gus didn’t want to feel bad, but he
did, and made a heroic effort to hide his feelings. Jay felt
scalded, and the pair of them had bounced off one another like
opposing magnets. Never had the flat felt so small. Never had
polite conversation felt so crude.
    Later that day, the phone had
rung three times in succession, only for Jay to hear nothing but
febrile static on the line. She’d had calls like this before -
weird misdialings, glitches in the system - but perhaps because of
her mood she invested them with a certain significance. Almost
ashamed of herself, she couldn’t help thinking of phantom calls
from the afterlife, a breath of a name whispered down the line. In
fact, she heard nothing like that, but there was a sense of
distance, of more than just space. Jay was no more superstitious
than the average woman. She read her stars in the paper and partly
believed in them when they presaged good news. She touched wood on
occasion, and had a crawly-spine dislike of the dark in old houses,
which she supposed derived from occasions in her childhood, when
she’d been parked at the abodes of elderly relatives by her
parents, so that they were free to enjoy themselves at weekends.
Both sets of grandparents had owned creaking, watchful dwellings,
where grandmothers had writhed in their beds of birth, and their
own mothers had decayed into gibbering strangeness and died. As a
child, Jay had been very conscious of the great grandmothers who
had died. She’d had bad dreams about their bedrooms, long after the
occupants had left them. Another demented great-aunt had minded her
on occasion, and had delighted in regaling her quivering
great-niece with tales of the Unaccountable Sounds that had plagued
her own childhood, specifically how she had heard a man slowly
climb the stairs outside her bedroom door every night. For some
reason, she associated this with a beheaded king. Nights spent in
this house had been a horror for Jay. Her ears had strained for the
slightest hint of a Sound. It had been difficult to sleep.
    Now, a whiff of those feelings
came back to her. She had never felt uncomfortable alone in the
flat before, not even just after Dex had disappeared, but