Here Lies Alice by J.A. Baker

Author:J.A. Baker [Baker, J.A.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Bloodhound Books
Published: 2022-06-05T16:00:00+00:00

27

Peter

He’s driving home from Coventry when Lauren calls. It’s been a pig of a week with demanding customers, late meetings and management breathing down his neck about sales figures and the constantly shifting targets that he has argued are unrealistic and unattainable. His neck is aching, his head stuffed with engineering problems about a particularly complex machine he has just seen and is supposed to solve by tomorrow morning. He is tired and in need of a strong coffee and a hot bath. And then a whiskey or two.

Peter presses the phone connection on the dashboard and does his best to not sound irritated and exasperated as an HGV overtakes him on the inside, splashing a wall of water up his side window.

‘Hi, what’s up?’ Lauren rarely calls when he’s on a long drive home. Coventry and back in a day is a five-hour round journey with a stream of snotty customers jammed in between.

‘Hi, Dad. Are you okay to talk?’

He wants so much to say that no, he is not okay to talk, that a huge lorry has just nearly wiped him off the road, that he is travelling at 70mph on the M1 in the pissing rain and that he is aching and exhausted, but he doesn’t. Instead, he tries to sound light and cheery like he hasn’t got a care in the world. Images of coffee and whiskey and a large plate of something stodgy that will fill his aching belly loom large in his mind.

‘Yup, not a problem. Fire away.’

‘Right. It’s just that I’m doing some research and studying for my English exam.’

‘Okay,’ he says wearily, wondering where this is going. He is still over fifty miles from home, his stomach is now howling, crying out for sustenance, his eyes heavy.

‘I thought I would use some of Mum’s books to help me out. Have you read any of them recently or had them out for any reason?’

Peter suppresses a sigh. Why would he now choose to read any of Sophia’s books? She was a fan of the classics – Dickens, Shakespeare, the Brontë sisters. Fine writers for sure, but not his cup of tea. ‘No. They look good on a shelf but that’s about as far as my interest in them goes. Why?’

He pictures a sickening stomach-plummeting scenario – a note stashed in there from a secret lover – another one – and pictures of the two of them together on a sun-kissed beach. He thinks of the times he worked away in Ireland and Denmark and ruminates over how it could be a possibility, how there could have been a string of romances, too many to count, then shakes his head and runs his fingers through his hair, weariness gnawing at him. He has to stop this. She had a lover. There is no way he is about to turn this into something it isn’t. Sophia was unfaithful the once. She wasn’t a serial philanderer. Was she? She didn’t have a store of secret men in her past, men she was deeply intimate with.

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.