As Meat Loves Salt by McCann Maria

Author:McCann, Maria [McCann, Maria]
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Publisher: HarperCollins Publishers
Published: 2011-04-27T22:00:00+00:00

EIGHTEEN

The Uses of a Map

My father was going to punish me, for I had done something terrible, written some foulness in the Holy Book, and he had found it out. I started awake in a wash of sweat and at once shuddered in terror: this was not home. Then it came back to me, and my shame and dread were not put to flight but increased.

I was lying on the black and white tiles, near the table. It was dusk. My head and shoulders ached; the shoulder muscles grated on my bones and one eye was sticky and would not open properly. There was firelight in the room and I rolled towards it. At once my heart stabbed violently, for there was a figure, silent and unmoving, in one of the fireside chairs. His head, seen in profile and lit by the flames, was held stiffly upright, the jaw set hard. I shook inwardly at the averted face.

‘Ferris—’

‘Harry laid you out. Before you killed someone.’ He was hoarse with bitterness. I tried to drag myself up off the tiles, to comfort him, and fell back groaning.

‘Are my ribs broken?’ I panted.

‘I hope so.’

‘Is this—’ I fingered my swollen face ‘—Harry’s work?’

‘Not all. Roger gave you plenty, once you were down.’

I was shocked at the picture thus presented. ‘You didn’t help me, Ferris?’

‘Me? I was lying with glass in the back of my head.’

I had forgotten smashing him into the bookcase. More shame came up over my soul, in foul, suffocating waves.

‘It was vile. I am vile, I know it now.’

‘You always know it after, Bad Angel.’

My heart sank at the despair in his voice. I said with a sense of having nothing to offer, ‘Would I could undo it! I have my punishment: my head and chest are agony.’

‘Good,’ he said and I saw the word drip from an icicle. He rose to his feet; I tried to rise too, but gasped with pain and finished by kneeling doubled on the tiles.

‘My aunt is lying upstairs, crying,’ he said in that same toneless icy voice. ‘It’s the army all over again. Roger has left us, and Richard, most likely; even Harry is not sure now. Where will we find another blacksmith? I could beat you myself.’

I watched his feet go out of the room. He closed the door softly, as if walking away from one already dead.

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