The Death-Defying Pepper Roux by Geraldine McCaughrean

Author:Geraldine McCaughrean
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: HarperCollins
Published: 2009-03-25T16:00:00+00:00

Circles expanded to the size of planets and shrank back to pinpoints. Fish hatched out of the pinpoints and grew and grew until breath bubbled from their mouths, and from the bubbles more fish hatched, and more and more and more, and they all had to be organized, slotted together…except that Pepper was a thousand miles out in space and his arms were a thousand miles long. He was separated, alone, drifting, and nauseous, tumbling through darkness….

So it was nice waking up in the hospital. The sheets were so smooth, he could not feel his body. The pillow was so soft that he might have been afloat. The smells and sounds were so strange and uninvited that he knew they had nothing to do with him. He did not have to do anything about anything.

Ever again.

He had finally outrun his body.

For there he was in the next bed! His clothes hung at the next-door bed-curtain rail, like a man cut down from the gallows: his bleached, braidless navy jacket, his nicked and torn trousers. His body made a mound under the next-door blankets. Pepper squinted down: Yes, there were his sensible lace-up shoes, scuffed, colorless, stained by the sheep. No clothes hung at the end of his own bed. Ah well. Ghosts don’t need clothes.

But apparently they do need to cough. Suddenly a string of coughs ripped through Pepper like a gas explosion demolishing a house. Around the room, a row of heads lifted and watched him with more joy than he thought was called for. “He’s back with us, nurse!” called one old man. Even Pepper Roux in the next bed sat up and looked across as well as he could with two black and swollen eyes.

Except that it was not Pepper at all but the stranger from the swimming baths—the one who had stolen his clothes.

“Five parts dead and gone you were when they brought you in,” said the thief, as if he were bringing Pepper up-to-date on a football score. “Bad night to sleep out in the rain. What were you drinking?”

Pepper did not trouble to answer. Words had to be mined from somewhere too deep inside him, and though he could feel them, like lumps of coal in his chest, he could not muster the energy to fetch them to the surface. With immense effort, he lifted one hand and waved it in the direction of the thief.

“Me? What happened to me? Yeah! Right! What happened to me? You want to know what happened to me? Common assault, that’s what. Aggravated bodily! What am I doing? I’m doing nothing! Who am I harming? No one! Then along comes her. One minute she’s got her arms around me, and I’m thinking, Do I know you, right? Get off me; I got standards. Next she’s punching seven colors of the rainbow out of me! And you know what? (You don’t, trust me.) She never even robbed me—well I’d got nothin’, but she couldn’t know that, could she? Woman scorned, right? Woman scorned, that’s what I reckon.

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