Hood A Novel (Emma Donoghue) by Emma Donoghue

Author:Emma Donoghue
Language: eng
Format: mobi
Publisher: HarperCollins
Published: 2013-09-21T21:00:00+00:00

THURSDAY

When I woke up next morning I couldn’t remember Cara’s face. I lay still for several minutes, calling up my store of images, but they had been robbed in the night. I could visualize her shape curled up on the sofa, or plucking a saucepan from a high shelf, or running down a road, but the face was wavering as if digitized, like footage of criminals.

The first thing I did was to run downstairs, my pulse twanging in my shoulders. Grace was curled up on the third stair; I took a double step to avoid him, but he somehow inserted himself under my slipper, and yowled in complaint. The Greek photos weren’t on the sideboard, or on the mantelpiece in the living-room; where could the sister have put them? I finally found them in the top drawer with the scissors and string.

I didn’t spare a glance for the cliffs and sunsets, the action shots on motorbikes. What I was tracking was Cara, hidden in every third or fourth picture. I studied these centimetres of plastic, recognizing the familiar elements of winey hair, faint eyebrows and blanched skin, but somehow they did not add up to her face. None of them looked very human either; she seemed like a creature from another planet who was trying to blend into the crowd of tourists.

We certainly didn’t live on the same elements. Once, I remembered, she had buried her face in the front of my grey mohair jumper. After a minute I became alarmed, and asked, ‘Can you breathe down there?’

Whatever she said was muffled by the wool.

‘What?’

She turned her face a little sideways, leaning her eyelashes on my breast. I could hear the smile in her words: ‘There are better things to breathe than air.’

None of these photos looked quite like the woman I knew. I brought them upstairs and put them on top of the pile in my photo box. Then I slid my fingers underneath, and flicked through the sparse schooldays photos till I found what I was looking for. The sheer audacity of me, to nick it from the Wall family album the first day I visited the big house. Kate was in the bath, I remembered, and the little redhaired sister was pestering me to admire pictures of their late basset hound. She ran off for a minute, to check the starting time of Top of the Pops in the TV guide, and I turned the pages of the album. There were not many of Kate – clearly she resisted cameras – and in most of them she was smiling boredly to order. But when I turned the loaded page, one picture caught my eye. Kate, on rollerskates in a deserted car park, hunched forward, giving the photographer one of those stern looks that used to stop my breath. She was in blue denim dungarees, the legs a little too short for her, one of the shoulder straps undone. Behind her, the little sister in a gypsy shirt scrambled to keep up, laughing through a faceful of hair.

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