Lullaby by Bernard Beckett

Author:Bernard Beckett
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: The Text Publishing Company
Published: 2015-04-14T04:00:00+00:00

9

It was no good. Just when I was sure I’d managed to push it out of my mind, it came back, shocking in its power. The earth still spun, the heavens still pulled, the tide of him sloshed backwards and forwards.

Him, Theo. Dying. Or dead? Which word to use? There was pressure at the back of my throat: a physical reminder of that thing I couldn’t swallow. I tried to cough it away, but produced only the gurgling of a drowning man. No, a drowning boy. The woman watched, waited. Doing her job.

‘So what happened?’ Maggie asked.

‘I did what you do. Found excuses to spend time with Emily. She made it easy for me, told me she wanted someone to help her learn her lines, even though her lines were fine. One time they needed someone to pick up the food for a cast lunch, and that was us, and then we both volunteered to help out when the crew doing the backdrop got behind with their painting. It was obvious she was waiting for me to say something, but it still took me another week to find the courage.’

‘What did Emily say?’

‘She said, not until the show is over. I took that as a yes. I floated through the entire season. I’ve never been so high. And then he fucked her.’

‘Or she fucked him,’ Maggie said. Cruel, and fair.

‘If we’re going to be accurate about it,’ I said, ‘they both fucked me. That’s what really happened.’

‘Why would they do that?’

‘The two of them on stage together. The school had seen nothing like it. Probably it never will again. By the end of the fortnight we were turning people away at the door. The last curtain call, we were all in tears. And it was straight from there to a party. I lost track of them, there was a lot happening. They were both high, on canisters and adulation.

‘I think of it like this. You never want a show to end. You cling to it, and sometimes that means you cling to each other.’

‘That’s a very generous assessment.’

‘Now. At the time I would have been happy to see them both dead.’

The sourness came back into my mouth. Maybe it had never completely gone away.

‘But they weren’t thinking of me, they weren’t thinking of how it would hurt me. They knew, of course, but there’s more to decisions than the things we know, right?’

‘What did you do?’

‘I wallowed in hatred. First Harriet and now Emily, that’s how it seemed. If I’d been a better person, I might have found another way of looking at it. I might even have been pleased for him, noticed that the person I loved more than anybody in the world was happy again, maybe for the first time since our parents died.

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.