The Ghost Factory by Jenny McCartney

Author:Jenny McCartney
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: HarperCollins Publishers
Published: 2018-12-22T16:00:00+00:00

Life had battered Eve a little bit already. Well, that was all right; life had battered me. I liked that about her. She had learned that happiness wasn’t a right, you had to try and make some of it yourself. She didn’t expect me to sweep her up on a white charger and carry her off to a big house with hot and cold running money flowing from gold taps, its rooms swarming with laughing, photogenic children. Even if I wanted to, I couldn’t have. She just wanted me to love her, but she was suspicious of love, and therefore of me: she came towards me jumpily, like an animal that was once pelted with grit and hasn’t forgotten the sting. Sometimes when she forgot to be suspicious and I forgot to be secretive, I was happier with her than I had ever been before in my life.

She wouldn’t let me stay with her when Raymond was in her place, a square two-bedroom council flat in a block in King’s Cross. It would confuse him, she said, and he had had enough of that already. But on the nights when he went to her mother’s we would lie folded together in the dark, whispering to each other and doing other things too without my old urge to escape afterwards, but only to stay there always.

You could hear the wind and the traffic outside, and I loved her the most then. I can’t remember all the things I told her: silly stuff to soothe her, about Big Jacky and the aunts in Carrickfergus and the way the starlings swooped and shifted like thick black smoke above the Lagan river at dusk. When she finally mumbled words to say goodnight, and her breathing grew deep and regular, I would wrap myself tight around her sleeping back, her breasts like heavy silk beneath the weight of my arm.

With her there beside me, I found that I could remember things without so much pain. I never told her the truth, though, about how I got the scars.

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