Read Online Something Fishy by Hilary MacLeod - Free Book Online Page B

had all the doors of his vehicle open, using the sea breeze to air it out. It was a no-smoking car, but she’d given him a hundred bucks to shut up and let her do as she pleased. “I would simply die if I had to last an hour without a cigarette,” she’d said, in a tone that implied it was some special skill. As it was, she sounded to him as if she were going to die – blowing smoke, hacking and wheezing her way across the island.
    That’s what she was doing now – hacking and wheezing, while Anton fantasized she was choking to death. Tears running down red-rimmed eyes, she regained her composure.
    â€œAs I was saying, trying is not doing. Have determination, for God’s sake.”
    â€œI will do it,” he said.
    â€œSee that you do,” she responded. “Or there won’t be any more money.”
    A familiar refrain.

Chapter Eight
    Newton was shivering – not his usual shivering from blood that ran cold. He was shaking with excitement that the rungs welded onto the turbine and the platform at the top were finally ready to be used.
    The metal had cooled and hardened. He stepped on the first rung, and though he was weak, he was so light that he slipped up the tower with ease. Rung by rung he went, his heart pounding in his chest, pounding with excitement to reach the top. Halfway. A few more steps. He was tempted to stop and look around, but he didn’t want to distill the experience. Eyes half shut, focusing only on the metal bars in front of him, the cold metallic shaft of the tower, he kept on pushing up, up, to his destination – the platform behind the blades.
    Fiona was watching him from her trailer, wondering what he was doing. She’d already talked herself into love with him, and her hands gripped the counter in fear for his safety. Smoke filling the trailer and the burning smell coming from the stove made her look away from him. Not for long. She grabbed the pot, yanked it off the stove, and set it down on the counter, where it proceeded to burn a dark ring.
    Then back to the window.
    He had reached the top. He stood there, arms outstretched, his image jerky as the blades passed in front of his body.
    He could see almost the full shape of the north shore of Red Island. He peered down the coast all the way to the east, where a lone lighthouse stood at the edge of a cape descending into a trail of rocks, reaching out into the water, ready to capture an unsuspecting boat. He saw the ocean side of New London Bay and the spit of sand drifting across it. To the other side, all of Big Bay and its islands. Beyond that, in the far distance, Red Island came to an end in a whirr of experimental wind turbines, and a trickle of stones that stretched out from the shore, washed by a shallow kiss of water. People would walk out as if walking on water. A stunning view, here, on top of his world, the whirr of the blades and their rhythmic movement lulling him into a semi-hypnotic state.
    Eyes closed, arms outstretched, he remembered being born. He remembered the moment of his conception. He remembered it in the deepest part of him. He had always been aware of the time when there was nothing, the floating darkness, and then light. Surrounded in fluid – the water of life – swimming, fighting to be first. Did others experience this? No one he knew had ever claimed to remember being born, and certainly not conceived.
    He’d thought about discussing it with a doctor, a psychiatrist, but, on the point of doing so, had drawn back. That moment of his conception was a treasure to him, a secret that he hugged to himself.
    He was more certain about what followed. The memory of the womb. He remembered the rhythm of his mother’s heartbeat, steady, comforting. It pulsed through his tiny body and veins, his own small heart.
    He remembered his brother. The intruder in the womb. He’d done what he could to strangle him with the umbilical cord, but then came that