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Back Scared to Live Save as PDF
Chapters (44)
  1. Dedication
  2. Chapter One
  3. Chapter Two
  4. Chapter Three
  5. Chapter Four
  6. Chapter Five
  7. Chapter Six
  8. Chapter Seven
  9. Chapter Eight
  10. Chapter Nine
  11. Chapter Ten
  12. Chapter Eleven
  13. Chapter Twelve
  14. Chapter Thirteen
  15. Chapter Fourteen
  16. Chapter Fifteen
  17. Chapter Sixteen
  18. Chapter Seventeen
  19. Chapter Eighteen
  20. Chapter Nineteen
  21. Chapter Twenty
  22. Chapter Twenty-One
  23. Chapter Twenty-Two
  24. Chapter Twenty-Three
  25. Chapter Twenty-Four
  26. Chapter Twenty-Five
  27. Chapter Twenty-Six
  28. Chapter Twenty-Seven
  29. Chapter Twenty-Eight
  30. Chapter Twenty-Nine
  31. Chapter Thirty
  32. Chapter Thirty-One
  33. Chapter Thirty-Two
  34. Chapter Thirty-Three
  35. Chapter Thirty-Four
  36. Chapter Thirty-Five
  37. Chapter Thirty-Six
  38. Chapter Thirty-Seven
  39. Chapter Thirty-Eight
  40. Chapter Thirty-Nine
  41. Chapter Forty
  42. About the Author
  43. Also by Stephen Booth
  44. About the Publisher

‘Anyway, I thought you’d want to know. Was I right to call?’

‘Yes, you were right, Matt. Thanks. I’ll see you at the weekend, probably.’

A moment of silence again. The sound of Matt thinking. ‘Are you OK, Ben?’

‘Yes, I’m fine.’

Finishing the call, Ben went back to his PC. There was an offer of fake Rolex watches that hadn’t been caught by his junk-mail filter, and an advert for the latest bargains at an online CD shop he’d used once. And there was an email from Liz. It was only a short one, but it meant a lot more than all the others put together. It finished with a little smiley face formed by a colon, a dash and a bracket.

It was odd to think that this might have been Rose Shepherd’s means of communicating with the world. Emails were a deceptive form of communication at the best of times. Without hearing the intonation in someone’s voice, or getting clues from their facial expression or body language, it was easy to misinterpret the meaning of their words. Irony could be taken literally, a joke could be read as an insult, and ferocious arguments could develop for no reason. Conversation was transmitted through a filter that got half of it wrong, like some unfinished translation program.

But at least it was communication, of a kind. Cooper remembered his mother’s attitude after she’d begun to get really ill and almost never left the house. Lying in her bed at Bridge End Farm, she had once said to him in a lucid moment that she wasn’t sure the world existed any more. When he asked her why, she explained that she had no evidence it was really out there still. Other people talked about it sometimes, but she never actually saw it for herself.

It had been pointless for him to argue with her. Of course, her family and friends often sent her postcards from the places they visited. Cheerful, colourful pictures of sandy beaches and historic buildings. France, Italy, Florida, Skorpios. Bulgaria, even. But Isabel Cooper didn’t believe in those places, any more than she believed in the people she saw on TV. For her, the outside world had become a series of images on a screen, and a set of postcards in a box. Just another illusion.

Maybe she had come to believe, like Bishop Berkeley, that nothing existed unless she perceived it for herself. Cooper didn’t know much about philosophy, only what he’d learned in a sort of slogan form during General Studies lessons at Edendale High School – esse est percipi, the principle of existence through perception. So he wasn’t sure what else Berkeley’s theory said. Was the opposite true? If you perceived something, did that mean it existed? Or could perception be an illusion, too?

Chapter Thirty-Five

Chapter Thirty-Five

Saturday, 29 October