Contents (48)
- PAST LIFE
- David Mark
- PART ONE
- PROLOGUE
- 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
- PART TWO
- TWENTY-FIVE
- TWENTY-SIX
- TWENTY-SEVEN
- TWENTY-EIGHT
- TWENTY-NINE
- THIRTY
- THIRTY-ONE
- THIRTY-TWO
- THIRTY-THREE
- PART THREE
- THIRTY-FOUR
- THIRTY-FIVE
- THIRTY-SIX
- THIRTY-SEVEN
- THIRTY-EIGHT
- THIRTY-NINE
- FORTY
- EPILOGUE
- ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
To herself, aloud: ‘Fuck, Trish … when Alzheimer’s comes along, you won’t bloody notice …’
The trill and buzz of a mobile phone, somewhere nearby. She dangles a hand down to the carpet, nausea rising up her throat. Closes her hand around the blessed coolness of an empty wine bottle and presses it to the sweat on her forehead. Rolls somewhere that feels like it might be to her left, and lands on the rag rug with a clatter.
‘Oh, you bastard,’ she mutters, hauling herself upright. She stumbles to the bedside table and manages to switch on the little light. Illuminates a square room with a high ceiling. Clothes in various states of their usefulness are scattered over ripped cardboard boxes, their contents spilling out in great archipelagos of paperwork and books and photo albums, their edges forming a rough pathway from the doorway to the bed. There’s a dried-up pot plant by the door: a housewarming gift from her girls. A mirror, at the foot of the bed, streaked with make-up and handprints.
Looks up, sharply. The damn phone again.
She grabs her cigarettes from the bedside table. Lights up. Takes a breath and gives a coughing fit that makes her ribs hard. Watches a photo album fall from a tower of hardbacks. Looks at the picture for a moment. Blows a kiss and tells herself to fuck off when she feels the tears prick at her eyes.
Spots the phone, skittering around by the door to the hallway. Grabs for it and puts on her best phone voice, even as her inner South Yorkshire lass is telling the caller that 2.10 a.m. is a bitch of a time to call somebody.
‘Detective Superintendent Trish Pharaoh,’ she says, in the accent she uses to talk to the chief constable and her daughters’ schoolteachers.
She looks at herself in the mirror as the duty sergeant pours violence into her ear. Looks away, appalled with herself. Focuses on the report of a suspicious body, called in by a neighbour, out at Sunk Island, on the arse-cheek of East Yorkshire. Signs of violence. Uniforms at the scene. Becomes more of herself as the words drop into her mind: coins into a jar.
Blood.
Brutal.
Mutilated.
Trish Pharaoh comes together as if the words are triggers: blinks away her hangover and the wisps of lingering nightmare as surely as if she were responding to a hypnotic suggestion.
‘We’ll take it,’ she says.
THREE
He stares into her. Aches.
It is a thudding thing, this love. It is a feeling with teeth and claws. It is built of need and hunger; of healing caresses and the warmth of skin on skin.
He carries her essence inside himself: makes a safe space for her within the wide, half made boat of his ribcage, feels the nearness of her warm, hot heart pushed up tight against his own. Sometimes he feels he is looking out through her eyes, and she through his.
She stands at the bedroom window, staring out. The sodium glow of the streetlight caresses the hollows and curves of her thin, sylphlike frame. She makes such tableaus into art. She’s slender. Dark. There are silvery scars on her legs from a bad injury a few years ago and the telltale shimmer of stretch marks across her taut belly, but she remains extravagantly beautiful. Her dark hair hangs loose, the tips forming inky hieroglyphs and scripture amid the colourful tattoos that pattern her shoulders and back.