The Curious Heart of Ailsa Rae (ARC) by Stephanie Butland

Author:Stephanie Butland [Butland, Stephanie]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781250217011
Publisher: St. Martin's Press
Published: 0101-01-01T00:00:00+00:00

Three hours later, Ailsa is still awake. Her feet ache, but most of the hurt is elsewhere. It’s in the centre-of-me heart, the I-didn’t-know-how-lonely-I-was-until-tonight heart. Apple is, it seems, catching up.

Even closing her eyes is difficult, because as soon as she does, the images she has stored today are focussed, bright: Seb, close up, intense, smiling, leaning closer, laughing, kissing. The words that weren’t theirs, written for star-crossed lovers, making a way for them to look at each other, to hold hands, to feel. The step-and-slide of the dance, the sound of the music running through her body, the fact that the only way to make the movements work were to trust Seb, to listen to what his body was telling hers to do, as she stepped into the spaces he made for her, pulling the sole of her shoe across the floor the way she’d been taught, keeping her heart close to his.

At four, Ailsa puts on the light and trails the duvet to the sofa. She rummages in her satchel for her notebook, wondering if writing something, anything, down will help, or whether it will make it worse – but her copy of Romeo and Juliet comes to hand first, pages turned down at the places where she and Seb have worked. She flicks through, and starts to read the rest.

Landing on the scene with Juliet waiting for Romeo to come to her for their wedding night, she reads: ‘“When I shall die,/Take him and cut him out in little stars,/And he will make the face of heaven so fine/That all the world will be in love with night.’” She wonders if Juliet would have been quite so attached to the idea of death if she had seen it stalk Romeo every day, turning him yellow, making him weak, his room full of the smell of dead lilies, even though there were no flowers in there, and only the occasional breath of Driftwood to remind her that he was still himself.

Ailsa goes to the window. The light pollution makes it hard to see the stars, but the rainclouds have cleared and some are visible, the brightest: she sees Orion, and, if she slides up the sash and cranes her head around a little, the Plough. She tries to be in love with night. But there is no comfort in the distant cold of the dead stars in the sky.

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