The Bloodstone Papers by Glen Duncan

Author:Glen Duncan
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780061876127
Publisher: HarperCollins

She came to live with us at the Brewer Street house (when she and I were going on six years old) because her mother, Dinah, was mad.

‘Aren’t you going to give Owen a kiss?’ Dinah said to Scarlet, as if to prove the issue. Scarlet stood holding on to a leg of our dining table. At the mention of a kiss she twisted herself round it in embarrassment disguised as abstraction. (I see it now as a foreshadow of the move that would come later round a pole in stilettos and her underwear. Can we trust the way a grown man remembers the behaviour of a little girl? When the grown man is me and the little girl Scarlet, yes. I remember everything.) ‘Come on, silly,’ Dinah said. ‘Don’t be shy.’

There was no kiss. Throughout dinner my mum and dad exchanged looks. I’d seen enough welcomes to register the qualification in this one. Dinah, who had a moist, pretty, antelopish face (and I’d noticed bruises on her shins like fingerprints), ate very little. Scarlet consumed only half a frankfurter and three or four chips. When she ate she curled her lips away from her tiny teeth and bit, nicely. ‘Aren’t you pretty,’ Melissa had said to her. Scarlet had lifted her chin and looked sidelong.

‘They came with me, you know,’ Dinah said. I’d been lost in Scarlet’s big-eyed face and emerged not quite at the utterance but at the lump of silence it deposited like a stone in the middle of the table. My mum and dad glanced at each other then both opened their mouths to say something before anyone could ask but they weren’t quick enough and Maude said, ‘Who came with you, Aunty?’

‘Who do you think as if you don’t know. They don’t realize I can see them, plain as day. But I can.’

‘You know Dalma’s getting married?’ my dad said.

Another silence. Then my mum said (Maude trying to work out whether she’d misheard): ‘Yes, to a doctor. She went into hospital for her tonsils and this young chap fell for her.’

Dinah laughed, not in response to this news but as if someone else had just whispered something to her while it was being delivered.

‘’Course, Sellie thinks she’s the cat’s whiskers now,’ my dad said. ‘Daughter marrying a doctor and all.’

Maude was looking around the table for confirmation she wasn’t suffering some sort of delusion.

‘Maude, can you help me clear, please?’

Dinah said: ‘You think I don’t know y’all are all in on it anyway, waiting so you can phone them.’

‘Maude,’ my mum said, ‘take Aunty’s plate. Come on.’

I saw all this, didn’t understand, observed looks passing between my sisters and brother and mum and dad, Dinah’s attention apparently engaged by something on the carpet. Scarlet tugged Dinah’s sleeve, repeatedly, until, as if after hauling her mind against the elsewhere gravity, Dinah turned and looked at her, and Scarlet cupped her hand and whispered something behind it, which turned out to be that she wanted the toilet, and wouldn’t be shown where it was by anyone but her mother.

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