Read Online Based on a True Story by Elizabeth Renzetti - Free Book Online Page A
Authors: Elizabeth Renzetti
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one of the inside sections across the table toward Alma.
A theatre review spread over a half-page, a huge photo anchoring it in the centre: Alma playing Eleanor of Aquitaine in a provincial production of The Lion in Winter . She ran a thin finger over the photograph that showed her face clenched in rage under a medieval wimple. “It was an abysmal production,” she said fondly. “The fellow playing Henry was blotto at every curtain, couldn’t remember a single line. We only realized later that it was the beginning of dementia. We played to empty houses.”
“Yes,” said Augusta, “but at least you had a full set of teeth.”
Alma slapped her lightly with one hand and picked up a pen to sign the newspaper. The woman took it back and slid it into its wrapper. She put a twenty-pound note across the table.
“Ah, so you would like the full deal,” Augusta said.
The woman leaned down, her beret dipping across one shining eye. “I have something special for you. I’ve been saving it for years.”
Augusta felt a curious lurch in the pit of her stomach. From within her bag, the woman took out a magazine, the kind that featured photos of celebrities’ improbably perfect weddings and Christmases. The cover of the magazine stirred no memory. She noticed the date in the top right corner: December 1993.
The woman was beaming with excitement. “I kept it because I know how rare it is, to find family pictures of you . . .” Augusta wanted to get up and walk away, but she felt pinned to her seat. She tried to reach out and push the magazine away, but the woman had already opened it to a dog-eared page.
Don’t look, she thought, don’t look . But of course she looked, and there she was, in front of a Christmas tree, with Charlie on her lap. She remembered the Blue Peter pyjamas that Ken had bought him. She pulled the magazine closer, as if the little-boy scent of him would lift off the page. How old would he have been? She did the math in her head: four. He would have been four years old. She scanned the image for clues, but she had absolutely no memory of the picture being taken. It was like looking at a stranger’s photo album.
Next to her, she heard Alma draw in a quick breath and then the woman’s bright voice: “What an adorable little boy. Where is he now?”
ten
The little gang of punks clustered on the towpath, Camden refugees in twenty-hole Doc Martens and with grommets the size of bath plugs stretching their earlobes. Augusta, leaning out her window, did not need to see her reflection to know that her forehead was a creased map of contempt.
Every day brought a different configuration of punks, but the one constant was a knobby-domed goon who spent his days fishing small plastic bags from the recesses of his bondage trousers. Their Artful Dodger. They’d strayed from their natural habitat, the market stalls and noodle shops of Camden, just out of sight around a bend in the canal. Downstream was King’s Cross, where the prostitutes and drug dealers had been driven from their once-rich hunting grounds by encroaching ciabatta peddlers and pilates studios.
Augusta had bought the flat in a moment of chemically assisted mysticism. It’s on the canal , she had thought when the estate agent first walked her through the empty, sun-drenched rooms, and I’m in Canals. The handful of Percocets she’d taken earlier had taken the edge off the morning and become her partner in crime: Buy the flat, Kit. You deserve it.
And Kit did deserve it, poor thing. After that string of husbands — the one who’d set fire to his scooter under her front window, the other who hadn’t mentioned he was wanted for war crimes — even the pluckiest barmaid in England was starting to feel the drag. Unfortunately, Kit was soon to meet her bloody end in front of a rack of cookery magazines at WH Smith, the victim of a desperate act of violence and, more importantly, the producers’ equally desperate desire never to work with
A theatre review spread over a half-page, a huge photo anchoring it in the centre: Alma playing Eleanor of Aquitaine in a provincial production of The Lion in Winter . She ran a thin finger over the photograph that showed her face clenched in rage under a medieval wimple. “It was an abysmal production,” she said fondly. “The fellow playing Henry was blotto at every curtain, couldn’t remember a single line. We only realized later that it was the beginning of dementia. We played to empty houses.”
“Yes,” said Augusta, “but at least you had a full set of teeth.”
Alma slapped her lightly with one hand and picked up a pen to sign the newspaper. The woman took it back and slid it into its wrapper. She put a twenty-pound note across the table.
“Ah, so you would like the full deal,” Augusta said.
The woman leaned down, her beret dipping across one shining eye. “I have something special for you. I’ve been saving it for years.”
Augusta felt a curious lurch in the pit of her stomach. From within her bag, the woman took out a magazine, the kind that featured photos of celebrities’ improbably perfect weddings and Christmases. The cover of the magazine stirred no memory. She noticed the date in the top right corner: December 1993.
The woman was beaming with excitement. “I kept it because I know how rare it is, to find family pictures of you . . .” Augusta wanted to get up and walk away, but she felt pinned to her seat. She tried to reach out and push the magazine away, but the woman had already opened it to a dog-eared page.
Don’t look, she thought, don’t look . But of course she looked, and there she was, in front of a Christmas tree, with Charlie on her lap. She remembered the Blue Peter pyjamas that Ken had bought him. She pulled the magazine closer, as if the little-boy scent of him would lift off the page. How old would he have been? She did the math in her head: four. He would have been four years old. She scanned the image for clues, but she had absolutely no memory of the picture being taken. It was like looking at a stranger’s photo album.
Next to her, she heard Alma draw in a quick breath and then the woman’s bright voice: “What an adorable little boy. Where is he now?”
ten
The little gang of punks clustered on the towpath, Camden refugees in twenty-hole Doc Martens and with grommets the size of bath plugs stretching their earlobes. Augusta, leaning out her window, did not need to see her reflection to know that her forehead was a creased map of contempt.
Every day brought a different configuration of punks, but the one constant was a knobby-domed goon who spent his days fishing small plastic bags from the recesses of his bondage trousers. Their Artful Dodger. They’d strayed from their natural habitat, the market stalls and noodle shops of Camden, just out of sight around a bend in the canal. Downstream was King’s Cross, where the prostitutes and drug dealers had been driven from their once-rich hunting grounds by encroaching ciabatta peddlers and pilates studios.
Augusta had bought the flat in a moment of chemically assisted mysticism. It’s on the canal , she had thought when the estate agent first walked her through the empty, sun-drenched rooms, and I’m in Canals. The handful of Percocets she’d taken earlier had taken the edge off the morning and become her partner in crime: Buy the flat, Kit. You deserve it.
And Kit did deserve it, poor thing. After that string of husbands — the one who’d set fire to his scooter under her front window, the other who hadn’t mentioned he was wanted for war crimes — even the pluckiest barmaid in England was starting to feel the drag. Unfortunately, Kit was soon to meet her bloody end in front of a rack of cookery magazines at WH Smith, the victim of a desperate act of violence and, more importantly, the producers’ equally desperate desire never to work with
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