Toby's Room by Barker Pat

Author:Barker, Pat [Barker, Pat]
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
ISBN: 9780141924212
Publisher: Penguin UK
Published: 2012-08-16T04:00:00+00:00

Fifteen

When the door clicked shut behind Elinor, she stood for a moment listening, but no sound reached her from the room beyond. The door was solid oak. This house had belonged – perhaps still belonged – to a wealthy man. It would have been commandeered ‘for the duration’ – or perhaps he’d volunteered to move out. Either way, he was going to get it back in very poor condition. Scratch marks, made by hundreds of heavy boots, had ruined the parquet floors.

Elinor’s thoughts were skittering about like bugs on the surface of a pond while her real feelings lurked in the depths somewhere, out of reach. She looked around: she’d lost all sense of where the main entrance was.

A man with one eye came up to her. ‘Can I help you?’

The other eye was a moist slit with a few sparse eyelashes clinging feebly to the lid.

‘No, thanks, I’m fine.’

She pretended she had somewhere to get to and walked off, head down, away from him. She could feel him watching her with his one eye, and started to walk faster. A turning led into a dark passage; she was afraid she might have blundered into the kitchen area, but no, the passage opened out again on to a wider corridor. She knew she had to give Paul plenty of time to make Kit talk, so she would just go wherever this corridor took her. God, she’d have liked to shake the truth out of Kit, but it wouldn’t have worked. If she’d tried to put pressure on him he’d only have clammed up more. He wasn’t going to tell her anything.

She was walking head down when a near-collision with somebody in a blue uniform forced her to look up. The corridor, almost empty when she set off, had become crowded with people all moving in the same direction: some nurses, but mainly patients. Faces loomed up in front of her, all kinds of faces; the bodies in their garish uniforms hardly registered. Men with no eyes were being led along by men with no mouths; there was even one man with no jaw, his whole face shelving steeply away into his neck. Men, like Kit, with no noses and horribly twisted faces. And others – the ones she couldn’t understand at all – with pink tubes sprouting out of their wounds and terrible cringing eyes looking out over the top of it all. Brueghel; and worse than Brueghel, because they were real.

She had to get away. She scaled along the wall, quickening her pace as the crowd began to thin. By the time the last of them had gone by she was almost running, and not looking where she was going until her nose came into violent contact with a man’s chest. Slowly, she raised her eyes, braced for God knows what horrors, and found herself looking at Henry Tonks.

‘Miss Brooke. Good heavens.’

Her mouth opened but no sound came out.

‘You don’t look at all well. Come along, let’s see if we can find you a cup of tea.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.