Read Online Like it Matters by David Cornwell - Free Book Online Page A

have been trying, actually.”
    It looked like she was going to move, or get up or something, so I put my hand on her arm and I said, “Sorry. Me too. I promise, I’ve actually been good. Months now.”
    She stared at me for a bit, but then she said, “Do you like photo albums? We’ve got enough of those.”
    We went back through to the lounge. It’d got a bit lighter in there, the daylight was pressing against the curtains, leaking in wherever it could. I noticed a little table set up in the corner—an antique thing with a bevelled stand and three claw feet. On the table was a random collection of dusty, pretty things: a pack of Edward Hopper coasters, an evil eye, a quill and a mostly empty bottle of purple ink, a jaw harp, some tarot cards, a small statue of some kind of tree done in iron and wire and precious stones. I was about to pick up the pack of coasters and look through them but then I felt her hand on my arm. Softly, I heard her say, “No, please don’t touch anything.”
    She told me to sit on one of the couches and then she went over to a cabinet near the window and unlocked it and opened it up. Dark as it was, I could see that the only things inside the cabinet—a tall thing, with about six or seven shelves—were photo albums. And they weren’t neat in there, they were all over the place. You just knew they were the only things in the room that ever got touched. She grabbed a couple from the top of the cabinet and then she bent down and took one plain white album from a shelf of plain white albums near the bottom. “Want to bring yourself outside?” she said, and headed to the front door.
    The way the daylight hit me when I got to the doorway, the way it stung my eyes and put spots in them, made me think of the couple of times in my life I’d hung out in a smokehouse. Both times were at this semi-abandoned place somewhere between Rosebank and Athlone, and all of a sudden—smiling up at a cloud and blinking away the spots, watching her move across the lawn to the oak tree—the comparison made me feel so good, so
proud
, like in the grand scheme things were definitely getting better
    Who cares that her dad pantsed you and you’re walking around in a beach towel?
    I met her at the tree. The thing was so big it had like four trunks. There was a bench knocked up between two of them and we sat down.
    She put one of the albums on her lap. Then she looked past me, sort of over my shoulder, checking out the house, and she put her hand in my hair and kissed me. As rough and ardent as the night before. That was her thing—she kissed like she might never get another one.
    I broke it off, saying, “No, maybe don’t.”
    “What’s wrong?”
    “Well, firstly, your dad would murder me. Or he’d come rushing out with some tea or something to throw in my face. And secondly,” I said, and I looked down at my crotch, “I’m kind of in a towel.” She laughed. “And we’re kind of out on the street here. It’d be a pretty depraved sight.”
    She laughed some more. “Okay, then you have to hold my hand.”
    “Deal.”
    “Do you really want to look at photos?”
    “Ja,” I said. “I really do.”
    But I got an instantly weird feeling from the photo album. I knew something was very off, even if I wasn’t sure exactly what it was. The first thing I thought, just from the opening pages or whatever, was that her dad, or whoever’d taken most of the photos in there, just couldn’t use a camera for shit. I could barely see what was going on in any of the frames, everyone was blurry. There were some shots that were so overexposed they looked like close-ups of burning lightbulbs. But she kept turning the pages, and then every once in a while she’d stop on a photo, one where you could actually see what the point of it was, and she’d tell me about those ones—
    And I got it, I worked it out—
    It wasn’t just that he was bad with the camera, what was weird about it was that he must’ve albumed