Human Pages by John Elliott

Author:John Elliott [Elliott, John]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Publisher: Chomu Press
Published: 2012-10-16T21:00:00+00:00

Agnes put the pages down and closed her eyes. Roberto Ayza again. His name was turning up too often to be a coincidence. Someone was definitely pointing her in his direction. Firstly, there was his involvement with Chance Company and her stay in Greenlea, and now, in addition, there was his appearance as a child in an unsolicited manuscript sent to Emily Brown by the Amadeo Cresci Foundation, whoever they were. Did he know her father, know where he was? Could he, himself, she paused on the brink of daring to think the impossible, be her father in a so far unrevealed identity?

She opened her eyes. They flitted distractedly over the shabby utilitarian furnishings and fittings of the nondescript room. Here she was, stuck in a brief transit area designed for someone who did not exist, thinking crazy thoughts. A succession of Emily Browns, or their equivalents, she guessed, had sat on the same sofa and were likely to continue doing so when, successful in her search or not, she had left the city. Nothing here belonged to her. Everything that surrounded her was someone else’s accessory, including Roberto Ayza. A gnawing sense of loneliness, which she had not felt in years, began to unzip her customary resolve. For the first time since she was a child, she had abandoned rational thought and had put herself completely in the hands of others whose motives, apart from making money, were obscure to say the least. She had let Chance Company, a nebulous outfit, entice her to a city she instinctively disliked, in the outside hope of finding the man she had long banished to a permanent exile or an unvisited grave. ‘I left him,’ she said softly then repeated it. ‘It was me who also left him.’

‘Yours in sisterhood, Elizabeth Kerry.’ The phrase kept troubling her. She picked up the pages again and flicked through them, looking for any further mention of Roberto Ayza. There was none she could immediately see; yet there was something wrong with the text, something that had bothered her earlier. It did not make sense. It purported to be a kind of oral history, but none of the contributors, listed or not, could have known the innermost thoughts, or recalled in such detail the long-past conversations, of the main protagonists. Who was the real author? Why give it to her if not to point her in a particular direction? Do something, she told herself. The trouble was, there was no routine to follow, no busyness, which normally filled her life, only the gap between being Agnes Darshel and being Emily Brown, and it was beset by unanswered questions.

She went into the bathroom, lowered the plug and turned on the hot tap. As she studied herself in the mirror, the phone rang. She lessened the water flow and moved back into the hallway. ‘Emily Brown.’

There was a pause. She heard the muffled sound of voices, then one voice, deeper over the line than when they had talked at the gallery.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.