Raw Shark Texts by Hall Steven

Author:Hall, Steven
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Canongate U.S.
Published: 2007-01-01T16:00:00+00:00

20

The Arrangement

“You?” I stared across the fire, loose inside my own skin.

“A part of me, a small stolen part, is a tiny part of him. Some of me – most of me – is still me, but,” her hand came up to touch the side of her temple. “God, look, I don’t know how to explain this. Part of him is inside my head.”

“You’re not making any sense. Jesus, what? You’re telling me you were possessed or something?”

“It’s more clinical than that, like, a process. It – the rest of him can’t control me or anything, but there’s a dormant chunk of him inside my mind and while he exists –” Scout stopped herself, took a big breath. “Shit, I so wasn’t going to do this. I was just going to lay it all out on the line, try to explain it to you using all the right words, but –” her hands tucked the ends of her bob behind her ears. Her chin, her throat, all of her, she was shaking.

“God, Eric, I’m sorry to say this but you’re so lucky. You’re walking around in this constant state of collapse and you’re fine with that, I mean, you exist like that. Some people, they might look like they’re in control day to day but if they let themselves go, maybe they’re going to fall all the way apart and never put themselves back together. You know?”

I put my hands up into a church around my mouth, sucked air through my fingers. My brain, my insides pulled in every direction at once. “All I need to know now is, did you send Mr Nobody to find me, Scout? Are you one of them?”

The firelight picked up the fat swell of tears along the bottoms of her eyelids. She worked hard not to let a single drop fall. “No, of course I didn’t. I would have used the fucking letter bomb on him, but your shark got there first.”

“It’s not my shark.”

“I’m saying I’m nothing like him. The me sitting here in front of you now and doing a really good job of fucking all this up, I’m a person just like you are –” a small laugh like a shudder “– although maybe you’re not the best person to make that argument to.”

I knew what she meant. “A concept wrapped in skin –”

“– and chemicals. There is more to people than that, you know.”

I waited as she had a sip from the water bottle, then splashed a cupped handful onto her face, massaging her fingers across her skin, from the bridge of her nose, over her eyes and cheekbones. This done, she offered the bottle to me and I reached around and took it.

“I don’t understand what you’re telling me,” I said. “The me sitting here? You’re saying there’s more than one of you walking around? Or –”

Scout ran her hands through her tucked-back hair, shaking it out. “Okay,” she said, “a part of me got stolen, I mean, a

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