Read Online Katherine Carlyle by Rupert Thomson - Free Book Online

Frings, in his apartment in Berlin. My heart thuds once, then dives deep. I leave the bed and move across the room. The moon is full and round on one side, worn on the other, the shape of a sucked sweet. I open the window. Cold air floods in.
    I think of where Adefemi lives, two rooms and a kitchen on the ground floor of a building in Trastevere. His next-door neighbor is a Brazilian woman who is always laughing, especially when she’son the phone. Adefemi thinks she’s a benign spirit; her laughter makes him happy. I remember telling him that it would drive me up the wall. He lowered his eyes.
Kit
, he said reproachfully. This was in the summer of 2012. We were sitting at his green table with the front door open. A view of parked motorbikes and a wire-mesh fence. Overhanging trees. I talked about my mother that night — the IVF , the cancer, the long slow death. I talked about my father too.
He never says he blames me but I’m sure he does. If they hadn’t tried to have a child she wouldn’t have died. It was the IVF that gave her cancer. It was all my fault
. Adefemi watched me as I cried. Sometimes his tongue clicked against the roof of his mouth, a sound that meant he disagreed with me, and sometimes he held my hand, but he didn’t tell me I was being hard on myself or self-indulgent or that none of it was true. He knew that would only make me angry. I was often astonished by how intuitive he was. How gentle.
He would do anything to get her back. He’d trade me for her, I know he would. He doesn’t have any time for me. He can’t even bring himself to look at me
. I was exaggerating, but I needed to exaggerate. I had to paint the darkest picture. Seizing a pair of scissors off the table, I snipped at the flesh at the base of my thumb. The pain was like a flash; it made me gasp. I dropped to my knees on the tiled floor, two kinds of tears in my eyes. The blood slid down my wrist with real purpose. Sometimes I have to prove that I exist. That I’m vibrant on the inside. Colorful. That I’m not a freak, an experiment. A shell. Adefemi looked frightened when I cut myself, but he watched me do it all the same, as though he knew it to be necessary. He seemed to realize that it was the mildest form of something that had to be undergone.
    At four in the morning, when I finally stopped crying, Adefemi reached out and took off my T-shirt. I lifted my arms abovemy head to make it easier. I was wearing nothing underneath. I remember the feeling of my hair falling against my spine, my ribs, the small of my back. It was always cool in his apartment, even at the height of summer. The temperature dropped as soon as you walked in through the door. His bedroom smelled of cement, as if it had only recently been built. He kissed my bare shoulders and then unzipped my jeans and pulled them off. He kissed me on the mouth. His breath tasted clean but sour, like vinegar.
    To start with, it was as tender as the light of the new day pushing through the shutters, and it stayed tender for a long time, but then I wanted it to change. By the end it was fast and hard, relentless. The bed turned through forty-five degrees. Moved halfway across the room. The cries that came out of me were like bright paint flicked against a wall.
    “I love the sounds you make,” he told me afterwards. “It reminds me of those birds that hover so high up that you can’t see them. But you can hear them. That’s how you know they’re there.”
    “Skylarks,” I said.
    My hand on his rib cage, his heart punching underneath. And the question I had then is the same as the one I have now.
    Will anything be that good again?
    A light clicks on in the apartment opposite, and a shadowy figure crosses behind a white translucent blind. Someone else who can’t sleep. I climb back into bed and lie down on my stomach with my head turned sideways on the pillow and my legs out straight.
    When I wake, the window is open and there’s a puddle on the floor. It must have