Whispers Through a Megaphone by Rachel Elliott

Author:Rachel Elliott [Rachel Elliott]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780992918286
Publisher: Pushkin Press
Published: 2015-10-10T16:00:00+00:00

He pours water into a paper cup and brushes his teeth. He hums ‘Good Feeling’ by the Violent Femmes, not because he is cheerful and feels like humming, but because he is nervous, jittery, full of adrenalin. He is thinking about Miriam and her plan to freak out and go feral. No man wants his eyes scratched out. Was she speaking from experience? Is this something she does on a regular basis? Was he safer when Red and Green were still here? Please God don’t let her take my eyes.

Treacle brushes against Ralph’s legs. He picks her up and holds her against his chest. Miriam appears, carrying an empty bucket. She places it on the floor and stands there, fiddling with her hands. The feral woman has been replaced by a girl, her eyes sad and dull.

“Are you tired?” he asks.

“Exhausted.”

“Shall we try and get some sleep?”

“Okay.”

Old sheets on a cold floor. A single sleeping bag, unzipped and open to cover them up. Her pillow, a squashed rucksack. His pillow, a leather bag and folded cardigan. In the corner, on a chair, propped against four cans of pilchards, a torch points at the roof.

A chattering bat launches itself into the air from a woodpecker hole in a beech tree. It shrieks, flaps its webbed wings, emits an ultrasonic sound, inaudible to the human ear. Echolocation. The sound travels, ricochets off the environment and bounces back, a message in an echo, informing the bat about its position and prey. A second bat peers out from the woodpecker hole before soaring into the darkness, closely followed by another.

The chattering, the shrieking, the silence that is not silent.

A helicopter circles overhead. Louder, closer; fading, almost gone; closer again. The circles tell us that something is missing, it is still out here, undiscovered.

A tawny owl bickers over boundaries with another tawny owl. Round face, feather and bristle, a symbol of wisdom with acute hearing and binocular vision. It strains to pick up the rustle of a mouse on the woodland floor and two seconds later, swallows it whole.

“Everything sounds louder from in here,” Miriam whispers, not mentioning her rapid heartbeat or the whooshing in her ears. She has never done this before. Never been in bed with a man. Not that you can call this a proper bed—it’s makeshift, pretend, and they are both fully dressed—but proper or not they are side by side, planning to sleep, and she can feel his arm against hers. When they speak, it will be pillow talk. It’s improperly real, really improper.

“Miriam?” Ralph says.

“Yes?”

“I probably don’t have any right to ask you this.”

Oh God, this doesn’t sound good.

“But, well, I’m just curious really I suppose.”

“What about?”

“The feral thing.”

“Feral thing?”

He pauses. How to say it? “When we were looking for the tins, you said you would freak out.”

Yes I did, she thinks. I did say that. That’s quite right. It was that feeling again, that insidious feeling. It happened again.

“It was quite an unusual thing to say,” Ralph says, trying to lower his voice, wondering if she is finding it too abrasive.

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.