The Wanderers by Tim Pears

Author:Tim Pears
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781408892329
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
Published: 2017-11-14T09:21:47+00:00

4

Lottie Prideaux opened the door to the library and walked in. The room was empty. She looked around for the magnifying glass. Her father used it to read the old almanacs and encyclopaedias, whose print was too small to read with the naked eye. The people of earlier epochs had better eyesight. This was, he claimed, but one of many measures of human decline. She found the instrument and removed her jacket. Though she intended only to borrow the glass, she hid it inside the jacket when she left the room. She walked across the hallway and up the stairs. She saw and heard no one, yet felt herself observed. The big house itself seemed to be listening to her, watching her, as she climbed the stairs.

In the attic nursery Lottie laid out the implements she might need upon the table. In the hours between tea and dinner she could expect to be undisturbed. The small hammer she had found in the cellar, amongst a box of tools that she believed might once have belonged to a cobbler, though she was not sure at all. The tiny nails or pins she’d begged from the estate carpenter, who said he used them when glazing windows and gave her a handful. The small, sharp pair of scissors were in the sewing kit that had once belonged to her mother. The slightly larger, blunter pair she’d found at the back of a drawer in her father’s desk. She had never seen him use them and did not believe he would miss them. The tweezers or forceps were her own. The board was an old bread or chopping board found in the shed in the back yard. She had two knives, one a penknife, the other a small kitchen knife Cook had missed at once and even now, six months later, would shake her head periodically and bemoan: ‘Wherever has it got to?’ Sid Sercombe had showed Lottie how to sharpen them, and given her a whetstone, a small bottle of oil and a sharpening steel. The pipette she had been given by the new veterinary surgeon, Patrick Jago.

Lottie unwrapped the parcel the under keeper had given her that morning and placed the rat on its back upon the board. She spread out its four clawed feet and pinned them to the wood with smart taps of the hammer. The creature had been dead no more than twelve hours and smelled strangely like a dog. A sharp but not unclean aroma.

She counted the nipples or mammary glands. A row of five along each side of its belly. There were three openings above the tail: this, the vaginal; this, the urethral; this, the anal.

Lottie gripped the rat’s brown hair with her tweezers and lifted a pinch of skin above the urethra. Using the sharp scissors she inflicted a small wound. Then using her tweezers she lifted the skin and inserted the larger scissors, their blades unopened, into the wound, and poked them in from side to side to rupture the connective tissue and separate the skin from the muscle beneath.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.