The Mouse-Proof Kitchen: A Novel by Shah Saira

Author:Shah, Saira [Shah, Saira]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Atria/Emily Bestler Books
Published: 2013-07-02T00:00:00+00:00

Freya has a cold and a temperature. She’s blocked up and having trouble breathing, which makes the oxygen deprivation of her fits even worse.

I sit on the sofa, holding her on my lap, sponging down her boiling body as she slips into another fit. When she’s like this, it’s unbearable to be alone.

“Tobias!” I call.

Tobias doesn’t answer. He’s doing that thing of not hearing me again. It drives me mad, quite literally mad; I act irrationally. After I’ve called a couple of times I scream: “Come quickly—she’s not breathing!”

Tobias comes running. He looks at me in disgust. “She’s breathing fine.”

Her body is tensed, eyes up, head rolled to the right, one arm up, one leg down, rigid as a pointer dog. When I turn her around, she maintains that position. Then gradually she begins to come out of the fit, her mouth making a little clicking noise.

“I’m going to bed,” says Tobias. “It’s your turn. She had three fits at least as bad as that when I had her downstairs after you’d gone to bed last night and I didn’t wake you up.”

Left alone, I give Freya a little kiss. She flashes me a smile, sudden and complicit. I’m sure it’s a smile; it’s different to her wind grimace and it’s appropriate to the moment.

I give her a bath and the miracle happens again. She smiles: a secret, interior smile, shy and fleeting.

As I put her into her cot, I have a sudden sense of how easily she can be taken away—not just her life but her essence. Most of the time I can’t conceive of this; my mind won’t let me access that knowledge.

“Tobias.”

“Hmm.”

“Tobias, please wake up.”

But he snores on. I lie awake listening to her labored breathing, holding my own breath every time hers stops, not daring to go back to sleep in case it doesn’t start again.

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