Damaged by Simon Conway

Author:Simon Conway [Conway, Simon]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 0101-01-01T00:00:00+00:00

Waking, Seb saw aqueous light dancing on the crumbling yellowed plaster ceiling and for a few seconds he could not locate himself; there was a painful brightness that informed him it was morning. Recollection came soon enough; it was the September sun on the algae-clogged stretch of the River Esk outside. Autumn; the wind-down after the summer. 1987. The smell of stale alcohol and cigarette ash. He raised himself on to his elbows and studied the girl beside him, naked on her belly, a patina of fine dark hair visible at the base of her spine. She was Irish – a student at the university – but he struggled for her name. He recalled the night before. She’d cornered him by the bonfire, her eyes like black opals in red-rimmed cups. She had screwed him aggressively; kneeling astride him on the mattress on the floor – one hand stroking herself and the other planted on his sternum. Her hair down over her face, she panted – working herself into some kind of personal and private fulfilment; his hands crossed behind his head, staring upwards, preoccupied with the death of his brother.

It occurred to him that she might not remember his name. It seemed better that way. Carefully, he climbed out from under the pile of blankets, picked up his lens case and padded naked across the bare boards out on to the landing and down the stairs, judging the steps by memory – he was almost blind. He went out to the tap in the sunlight, and rested his lips against the spout, gulping greedily at the cold water. When he looked up he saw his blurred reflection in a shard of mirror propped on a ledge. His swollen, dissipated eyes. He rinsed his fingers, and then put in his lenses, a daily ritual; left eye then right eye. The cleaning solution stung his eyes, squeezing tears from beneath his tightly closed eyelids. He shook his head. When he opened them again, his face emerged from the blur and he contemplated his reflection in quiet desperation.

He went back into the castle, and ran up the stairs two at a time, pausing briefly on the landing to confirm that the day’s food was in, and glanced into the big room. There were sleeping bodies everywhere. He was one of the few with their own rooms. He went back to it and dressed in jogging pants, hooded top and trainers. The girl did not wake.

He spent ten minutes out on the lawn stretching, loosening his muscles in gathering anticipation, and then ran five miles, following the paths through the dew-drenched ruins of the castle gardens, dodging between overgrown rhododendrons and avenues of beech trees, leaping down the embankment and across the old railway line, crossing two farms – hurdling electric fences and scattering heifers – making a loop round the council landfill and coming back with the sun in his streaming eyes. Sprinting, his churning knees rising almost to his chin. The urgency in him was not something that he could control.

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