The Gifts by Karen Perry

Author:Karen Perry
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781405924283
Publisher: Penguin Books Ltd
Published: 2015-06-02T16:00:00+00:00

PART ONE

* * *

Dublin 2013

1. Katie

It starts with the pictures.

A Thursday morning, much like any other in the office, three of us standing around Reilly’s desk shooting the breeze while we wait for the deputy editor to arrive. The others are giving me flak on account of my appearance – last night’s make-up slipping off my face, my hair still spiky with grips, the collapsed up-do that I haven’t yet brushed out. I’m feeling like I’m only half present. The other half of me is biding my time until I can get back to my desk, finish writing my piece, then high-tail it home to my apartment for a shower and a long sleep.

Colm from Legal says: ‘Jesus, Katie, the smell of booze off you would knock out a horse.’

Beside him Peter sniggers and I smile sweetly. ‘Just doing my job, boys. Sacrificing my sobriety for the scoop, you know how it is.’

And he says, no, he doesn’t, but it’s all fine, really, despite the pain searing my temples and the weariness rising up my legs, like mercury in a thermometer. I’ve been here before. And then Reilly arrives, clearly harassed, as if he has something important to tell us. He sits in his chair, throws the pictures onto his desk and says: ‘Get a load of these.’

The four of us lean in to peer at them and straight away I feel it start.

Pictures of a dead girl floating in a swimming-pool.

‘They just came in,’ Reilly tells us. A death at a party in the early hours of the morning. Drink, drugs, a bunch of students, a game that got out of hand.

Peter is spreading them out now so that they cover half of the desk. The water so clear. The girl, only a teenager, her hair fanning out in the water.

‘Some sicko at the party took these with his phone,’ Reilly explains.

‘We can’t print them,’ Colm says emphatically. ‘There’s no way.’

‘So fucking ghoulish,’ Peter whispers, with an air of fascination. His eyes are soaking them up.

‘Her parents probably haven’t even identified her body yet, and here we are staring at these,’ Colm says, disgusted.

‘We can’t print them, but there’s a story nonetheless,’ Reilly insists, ‘about camera phones and the lack of morality governing their use.’

He’s directing his comments at all of us. I’m listening to him, but I can’t drag my attention away from the pictures. The creamy whiteness of her skin, the reddish cloud of hair spreading in the water. Clothes sticking to her limbs. Her body half turned as if in a slow farewell. Eyes open and unseeing, her mouth frozen into an O of surprise. I imagine all the water leaking into her, filling her, swelling her lungs to bursting point.

Someone says my name.

But I stare at the pictures, transfixed. Not a bubble of air. Just the stillness of that girl beneath a film of water. I look at her and feel the change come over me, that tender place deep inside me prodded with a stick.

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