Chapters (49)
- Cover
- Table of Contents
- Also by Graham Hurley
- LIMELIGHT
- Copyright
- Dedication
- Epigraph
- ONE
- TWO
- THREE
- FOUR
- FIVE
- SIX
- SEVEN
- EIGHT
- NINE
- TEN
- ELEVEN
- TWELVE
- THIRTEEN
- FOURTEEN
- FIFTEEN
- SIXTEEN
- SEVENTEEN
- EIGHTEEN
- NINETEEN
- TWENTY
- TWENTY-ONE
- TWENTY-TWO
- TWENTY-THREE
- TWENTY-FOUR
- TWENTY-FIVE
- TWENTY-SIX
- TWENTY-SEVEN
- TWENTY-EIGHT
- TWENTY-NINE
- THIRTY
- THIRTY-ONE
- THIRTY-TWO
- THIRTY-THREE
- THIRTY-FOUR
- THIRTY-FIVE
- THIRTY-SIX
- THIRTY-SEVEN
- THIRTY-EIGHT
- THIRTY-NINE
- FORTY
- FORTY-ONE
- AFTERWARDS
‘Yes. Not physically, not in the end, because that was impossible, but the answer’s still yes. It was unconditional on my part. I just couldn’t help myself, and you know why? Because I knew he’d never let me get the measure of him, because there were always bits he’d keep hidden. Mystery’s a great aphrodisiac, just like laughter. Don’t you find that?’
‘Of course. Your friend sounds like Africa. No matter how hard you try, you’ll never really get to know it. It’s at your fingertips, just there. You can see it, you can sense it, you can smell it, but you can never quite get on top of it. You can’t pin it down. Lions and tigers and all that safari stuff is one per cent of the story. Africa makes you bleed. And only then do you begin to even half understand.’
Africa makes you bleed? This is powerful stuff, beautifully put, a perfect gem sieved from the torrent of Christianne’s conversation. We’re climbing now, the row of houses along the seafront behind us, and the path ahead looks steeper and steeper. Christianne is still hanging on to my arm, but she’s stumbled a couple of times and I tug her to a halt.
‘You’re OK with this?’
‘With what?’
‘Walking?’
‘Of course. If you’re tired, we can stop.’ She says she feels rain in the air, and she’s right. She has an anorak but I’m wearing nothing more weatherproof than a thin cagoule. She gestures up at the clouds and produces an old-style plastic mac.
‘Here,’ she says. ‘Put that on top.’
I do her bidding, and then we forge upwards again, trying to match each other step for step. There’s something irresistible about this woman. She’s fun, if slightly unhinged. Her habit of zigzagging through a conversation makes me laugh. Between outbursts of her own, she has a talent for listening, which is rare, but there’s something else about her that I can’t quite pin down. She seems excited, liberated, the way you might be if you’d booked to go away, maybe on a whim. She seems to have somewhere strange and exotic in mind, but at the same time she’s given to fleeting moments of near-impenetrable silence when the look in her eyes tells me I’ve lost her. The more often this happens, the more I’m tempted to ask why, but just now this rapport of ours is too new and too delicate to bear much real weight. All I know for sure is that Andy McFaul is a very lucky man.