Read Online Nine Days by Toni Jordan - Free Book Online Page B

is more like a coin: moving between people all around us, all the time, linking people within families and on the other side of the world, across oceans. If we drew the path of a single coin, the trajectory it had taken, it would link us to all kinds of strangers. We would be connected to people we’ve never even met.
    ‘A shortbread? No?’
    Fuck, fuck, fuck.
All at once I see it.
    It was not Violet who was responsible for the violation of our relationship. It was me. I have crossed the line. Going to Violet’s home means I have put my own needs above the client’s. A major professional transgression. I can’t do this job anymore. Not for one more day.
    There’s a draught in my mother’s kitchen, a window left open. The skin on my arm is puckered under my fingertips. I shiver: little goosebumps, a ghost walking over my grave.
    ‘It’s later than I thought,’ I say. ‘It’s time I got moving.’

CHAPTER 3
Jack

    WHEN I WAKE a couple of hours later my head is wedged between the wall and the mattress. My feet hang over the edge. The spare pillow has dislodged during the night and the cast-iron rung is cold and hard against my calf. I am used to sleeping in my swag or a bunk but this bed is only just broader than my shoulders. One turn too wide or too fast—if I dream I am back among the horses and the sheep, cutting and weaving across the paddock—I’ll be over the edge and face down on the lino. Way over on the other side of the room, three feet at least, the tiny chair is covered with my clothes. At least it’s good for something. It’d never hold my weight and my knees wouldn’t fit in that little space under the desk.
    I’ve been home for months now, and they’ve a shop full of beds and mattresses and chairs downstairs. Furniture the right size could be up here in two shakes. Yet they don’t mention it. It seems I’m the only one who notices I’ve grown. And I don’t say anything either. This Gulliver life fits my mood, a stranger in a strange land.
    There’s a rap at the door. ‘Jack,’ she says. ‘Are you awake?’
    I can imagine her face close to the keyhole. She’s been pacing up and down the hall for the best part of ten minutes. She’s imagining what she might be disturbing. She is unsure how to mother a grown man.
    ‘Yep.’ Soft, but she’ll hear me.
    ‘I know it’s a Sunday, dear. But we don’t tend to lie in so long. Not normally.’
    Sunday or no, every morning since I’ve been home she’s knocked around seven and said
we don’t tend to lie in so long.
She thinks me content to sleep half my life away in this littleboy room. She’s concerned I’ve developed lazy habits, despite the work I do in the shop, lifting furniture, cleaning and repairing the whole day long. She doesn’t know me. Not at all.
    ‘Jack? You’ll be coming to church with us?’ she says.
    Mum and Dad hadn’t seen the inside of a church since my christening but that all changed when the King asked for prayers for the Empire, prayers that we’d defeat Germany good and quick. Since then, they’ve been every week and they’re not alone: St Stephen’s is packed to the doors. Another thing about this city I don’t understand. If the power of prayer is strong enough to keep Hitler at bay, it should have come in handy before now.
    ‘Not today,’ I say to the door. Her footsteps fade.
    There is no air in here. The window is nailed shut. When I went down to get a hammer to pull the nails out that first night, Mum said,
No Jack, please don’t.
Her face screwed into a mess of wrinkles. She looked just like my mother, except older.
What with all the valuables we have downstairs and I’ve heard of burglars letting themselves in first-floor windows.
So that was that.
    It’s not just this room, not just this house. Even the sky’s too low. The view is not the sunlit plains extended. Our part of Richmond, here on the hill, is an island. I can see over the roofs of the rest of it, mismatched shingle and rusty