The Family Remains by Lisa Jewell

Author:Lisa Jewell [Jewell, Lisa]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781804941362
Publisher: Cornerstone
Published: 2022-07-04T18:30:00+00:00

I pause. I was going to say Joshua, but if Kris has tracked Phin down, he might have said something about a strange British guy called Joshua asking questions, so I think for a moment and then I sign it ‘Jeff’.

I fold the note into a square and I go back down to Phin’s apartment and leave the note pinioned under the fox’s chin. Then I head out to a perfumery I noticed earlier three blocks down and I spend seventy dollars on room sprays and scented candles.

There is no message from Phin by the evening. I’m hungry, the day is growing dark and I’m feeling a terrible thumping, throbbing urge for something, and I do not know what it is. I don’t know if it’s sex. I don’t know if it’s alcohol. I don’t know if it’s exercise or violence or loud music or junk food but there is something in my gut and it’s roiling and agitating and I have a sense that I would like to punch the wall, but I have done that before and it was incredibly painful – the scuffs and cuts took three weeks to fully heal – and frankly it was not worth it.

I pace this apartment which now smells of lilies and mandarins and, apparently, sea foam. My hands clench and unclench. My breathing solidifies. I watch some porn on my phone, but it just makes me cross. I decide I need to go out. I take the echoey central stairs and cut down the corridor on the first floor. I pass Phin’s door and see that the note is still there. I thunder down the last staircase and I burst through the front door and on to the street and immediately I feel myself plugged straight into the energy of the balmy Tuesday night, of the streets filled with office workers cut loose from desks and tedium, with tourists and locals and old people and young people, and I walk where they walk, in their slipstream, like an invisibly coupled train carriage, and I think I probably look mad and I think I probably am mad, and the lights sparkle and refract and make me feel dizzy and drunk although I am entirely sober, and at some point I decouple from the crowds and stop outside the doors of a brasserie with six-foot parlour palms in front of heavy velvet curtains and a maître d’ in fitted black shirt and trousers and a smile to charm the birds from the trees as well as the mad lonely man from the street, and I am ushered into a booth and given a menu, and I order the porterhouse steak for $90 and the onion rings and a Tibetan wine called Shangri-La can you believe it for $450, and I drink the wine as if it is fruit juice and barely touch the steak because I’m not actually very hungry after all and my eyes cast across the room towards the pavement and I look at the men going by, at the boys, and I want all of them, all of them.

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