The Paper Eater by Liz Jensen

Author:Liz Jensen
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
Published: 2000-09-05T22:00:00+00:00

HARBOURVILLE

In the week that followed the Festival of Choice and Harvey Kidd’s arrest, Atlantica glowed like a bride.

Warm breezes drifted in from the distant continents of North America and Europe, their limpid salt wash merging delicately with the peppermint freshness of the capital, where Atlanticans walked with a spring in their step, alive to the symbiosis between land, sky and sea, and the myriad lives that fluttered in the air, moved on land or writhed beneath the carpety surface of the deep, from whales and squid and octopuses down to the smallest, flickering urges of krill.

In the city, flat vistas of glass and cool cement juggled shadows in the changing light, the pylons murmured, and a static vibration swarmed across the sky, shooting fragments of pure energy down to the streets, the avenues, the hushed crevices where, beneath the safe shadow of skyscrapers, the customers of Atlantica went about the simple, proud business of being part of society.

From a small corner of this peaceful world – from a house in a street in South District, comes a low groan of physical and mental discomfort.

– Mmmmm, moans the woman. Oargh.

The street, a small cul-de-sac with its own gas pump. The house, one upon whose front door gleams a bronzed fibreglass plate bearing the words: Stress-Management Consultancy – Please Knock GENTLY. The woman, Gwynneth, turning listlessly in crumpled sheets, struck down by the whirling nausea of morning sickness.

Her lover Geoff is in attendance. His five o’clock client has cancelled his Winding Down appointment, and the stress-management consultant has taken advantage of this unexpected lacuna to return to the conjugal bed – only to discover that passion must play second fiddle to the tiny rival of their embryonic child. For Gwynneth, at the age of forty-two, is pregnant.

– Just take a deep-deep-deep-deep breath in, counsels Geoff, in the hushed, low, capable voice he has developed in a work capacity. He finds it can be applied domestically too. – And then let it out again very, very slowly. SLOWLY. Balance out your Yin and Yang, that’s right.

Gwynneth obeys. But as she breathes (– In … out. In … and out, murmurs Geoff soothingly), Gwynneth’s mind – rucked as the sheets – can’t help floating down the flowchart of possibility ahead of her, and meandering into its tributaries. Tiffany’ll be moving out, no doubt, once she’s got her Libertyforce promotion. And then she and Geoff will have the place to themselves and Baby. It’ll be like starting all over again. A brand-new family. And a second chance. Doesn’t she deserve a makeover?

Gwynneth sighs and blinks her round, mother-of-pearl eyes. She doesn’t feel bad about Libertyforce catching up with Harvey – that’s how she thinks of it, that’s the phrase she uses – ‘catching up’. After all, she’s at one remove from it, isn’t she? But – well, she can’t say she feels one hundred per cent good, either. It’s kept her awake at night – that and the pressure on her bladder, which forces her to piss a thimbleful of urine twenty times a night.

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