Read Online Somebody Loves Us All by Damien Wilkins - Free Book Online Page A

them, not that he said anything to indicate this. He’d asked her to go over the same story several times. She’d got up in the middle of the night, feeling sick, and she must have passed out. And then what? She woke up, cold, on the bathroom floor.How long had she been lying there? Not long, she thought. She cleaned up the blood. Cleaned up the blood! he said. What was it, a murder scene? Then what? I went back to bed, she told him. I’d put a dressing on the cut. Had she used disinfectant? Had she phoned her doctor at once in the morning? Was she feeling all right now? He wanted to know everything about it. But he seemed to be asking something else too, along the lines of, What phase are we in now?
    Not long ago she’d answered the door of her old house to Paddy and Helena in her gaming headphones. She was also wearing a microphone hooked over her ear. At once she saw it was a mistake. One’s children were too easily disturbed.
    ‘What are you, a call centre now?’ said Paddy.
    ‘Sorry, I’m playing,’ she said. She’d been in the middle of a session and had forgotten the time. That was easy to do. It meant nothing.
    Helena asked about the headphones.
    ‘You feel more engaged wearing them,’ she said. ‘You’re trapped in their sound world. All the senses are heightened.’
    ‘How often are you on this?’ said Paddy, disapproving.
    ‘Every day,’ she said. What was the point in lying?
    She played Cushion, an odd game that was half-billiards, half a strategy test involving nineteenth-century diplomacy. You did deals on behalf of your country—sometimes you were at war, sometimes peace—and then you played your opposition in real-time billiards. That was the odd part. Two games really, joined, and without total success, and yet it was addictive. Cigar smoke drifted across the screen as you were taking your shot. The sound effects suggested drinks being poured, a strange spurting, which she’d worked out belonged to the soda fountain. You were building an empire, or losing it. It was impossible to explain. Her avatar was Cleopatra, which was also outrageous.
    ‘What is an avatar?’ said Helena. ‘It sounds amazing.’
    Her guests pretended to be interested for a while and then thankfully the conversation moved on.
    The scenarios in Cushion were loosely historical and Teresawas very good at it. Recently, she’d beaten someone in Belgrade who then sent her a message written in, she guessed, Serbian. The inserted smiley was a face with a penis being pushed in and out of its mouth. She’d annexed his country. The message board was normally a clean, polite place. Obscenities were quickly removed. But this one hung around for days. Finally she posted: At first I thought it was only your mind that was small. The next day Belgrade was gone.
    Could someone with dementia do all this?
    There’d been more from Pip on Skype: Why do people MOW THEIR LAWNS? Pip was struck by things. The cousins had not seen each other since Pip’s last visit more than ten years before. They were planning a reunion and Teresa had promised to come to her, to see Palmerston North in all its glory. Pip had written: What is wrong precisely with GRASS?
    Teresa began to type an answer and then stopped, changing her status to Not Available. She couldn’t risk it. Her jaw was still, more or less, wired shut.
    She knew what she had now. Bang.
    The French dictionary was in the Whitcoulls bag and she put the bag in a drawer in her bedroom and lay down on her bed. She couldn’t remember taking off her shoes. She knew what she had.
    The ceiling was a set of exposed wooden beams, like the powerful skeleton of an ancient ship. The building was a converted factory and it still carried some sense of machinery, conveyor belts, men and women looking at things for dreadful hours, pulling flawed items from the procession and tossing them in reject piles. Indeed it had been a shoe factory. Sometimes when the lift doors opened and air came up from the