Read Online Spin by Nina Allan - Free Book Online

I think I will.” What Macy said shocked her a little. In her
weekly emails to her father she told him which books she was
reading and passed on brief snippets of gossip from the Minerva
because she knew he liked to hear these things, but his replies
were short and he never gave any indication that he was affected by
her absence. She didn’t like to think of her father unhappy, but
the truth was there were days when she didn’t think of him at
all.
    “ I should go,” she said to Macy. She went home feeling
depressed, wondering what she had hoped for from Macy, why she had
wasted her time. She decided to spend the rest of the evening
selecting the colours for the new panorama. The feel of the silk
between her fingers restored her spirits as it always
did.
    She had
decided to concentrate on one scene from The Pirates in particular, a sequence from the third canto
where the soldier Telos Mavrommatis captures a pack of night hounds
and drives them aboard Atlas Tyburn’s trireme the Hesperion . She
chose deep, sure colours, venetian red and yellow ochre and
Prussian green, colours that would capture the drenching heat and
burnished intensity of the Aegean summer.
    She went to
bed late and slept badly. She could not stop thinking about the
night hounds, which with their sleek coats and long muzzles
reminded her of a lurcher her father had owned once, that swam out
to sea in pursuit of a moray and never came back.
    She supposed
her preoccupation with drowning was inevitable, given her family
history. She washed and dressed, feeling muzzy-headed and somehow
unreal. Just as she was leaving for work her mobile rang. It was
Nashe Crawe, asking if she could come and see Alcander.
    “ He’s been better this week,” she said. “Your visit did him
good, I know it did.”
    For a moment
Layla imagined the packed, stuffy room almost with dread. Then she
told Nashe Crawe she would come over that afternoon after her
shift.
    The house felt
different, less dark perhaps, although she supposed this was simply
because its darkness was less unexpected. Also, Nashe Crawe was
there to meet her.
    “ I’m so glad you could come,” she said. “He hasn’t said much,
but I know Alcander’s excited about seeing you.”
    Layla mumbled
some meaningless pleasantry. Once again she felt embarrassed for
Alcander, having his privacy invaded, his every action and reaction
observed and noted. When she was finally alone with him she thought
at first there was no change in him, that the improvement his
mother had mentioned was all in her head. But then she noticed the
way he was sitting, upright against the pillows rather than slumped
back against the headrest. Beside the daybed stood a wheeled
trolley of the kind used for serving meals in a hospital or a
convalescent home. On it was a laptop computer.
    “ I’ve been working, just a little bit,” he said. He nodded
towards the laptop, touching the edge of the trolley with one
bandaged hand. Layla could see dark stains on the bandage, places
where mucus and perhaps also blood had seeped through. But the
lesions on his face looked slightly less red, or at least she
thought they did.
    “ I’ve been reading The Pirates ,” she said. “I think I’m falling in love with
Telos Mavrommatis.” She smiled, sitting down on a chair near the
window. She saw that the hologram projection had been reprogrammed
to show a lake ringed by tall conifers. A wooden landing stage
jutted out across the water. She found the change in the landscape
disconcerting, although she supposed Nashe Crawe rotated the
scenarios on a regular basis.
    “ Seriously, do you like The Pirates ?” Alcander asked. “Some people find his early
stuff a bit florid.”
    “ I don’t know much about poetry. But this, I can’t explain
it.” She paused. “I like the way it makes me feel. As if I was a
part of the story. It reminded me of the vTV shows I used to love
when I was a kid, the ones with all the monsters and gladiators. I
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