Read Online The Bellwether Revivals by Benjamin Wood - Free Book Online

tentative endorsement, an invitation to spend more time with her. And Oscar could see no better reason to come back tomorrow than the prospect of getting close to her again, even if it meant indulging Eden for a while. ‘Okay. I’ll come,’ he said. ‘If it means that much to you.’
    Eden gave a faint smirk. ‘I was thinking eight o’clock?’
    ‘My shift might run over.’
    ‘That’s alright, we’ll wait for you.’ Eden accepted a glass of port from Jane and gestured towards the ceiling. ‘Tell Iggy to come back and drink with us.’
    Oscar said goodnight and headed into the hall. He went up the cold wooden staircase to look for her, expecting the old boards to creak under his feet, but every step was close to soundless. The bathroom door was open at the top of the stairs and a shaving light was on above the washbasin. He nearly walked straight past,but then he noticed a pale arm drooping over the side of the bath, an ashy cigarette between two of its fingers. Iris was laid out in the empty tub, asleep. She was still wearing her recital gown and looked impossibly comfortable, her neck lolling towards the tiles, a peaceful look upon her face. He didn’t want to wake her. Down in the hallway, he wrote his number on the pad by the telephone, tore it off. The others were still talking in the next room, and he imagined the cheery rumble of their voices lasting until dawn. He found her brown coat hanging by the door, slipped the note into the pocket, and went out into the night.

T HREE
A Reversible Lack of Awareness
    The next day, things were quiet at Cedarbrook. Oscar spent his breaktime in the conservatory with
The Passions of the Soul
. It was an awkward translation and he made slow progress to begin with. The language was dense, arrhythmic, old-fashioned (relying heavily on words such as ‘thither’ and ‘oft’), and a significant percentage of Part One seemed to focus on the digestion of meat in the human body. He put the book away and vowed to try again during his next break.
    He wanted to speak to Dr Paulsen about it, but the old man was not in a talkative mood. His first attempt at communal dining had gone smoothly, in that he’d managed to eat breakfast with the other residents without catapulting poached eggs at them, but his second attempt, an evening dinner of boiled ham and potatoes, had not been a great success. Oscar had reported for his shift at eight, only to be informed by Jean, the staff nurse, that there had been a ruckus in the dining room the night before: ‘Your friend Paulsen tried to pull off the whole tablecloth.’ Jean was a big woman; when she got upset, her jowls shook and her ID badge flapped against her breast. ‘He was spitting at everyone, throwingmustard, potatoes. It was ugly.’ Oscar had gone up to Paulsen’s room to see if he could find out what the problem was, but the old man wouldn’t speak.
    At quarter to five, Jean came to the nurses’ station and told Oscar he could leave early, so he walked straight back to his flat to shower and change out of his uniform. He ate dinner, left the dishes soaking in the sink, then sat under the pale kitchen light and tried again with Descartes. The prose was no easier to consume. It was just the kind of book that somebody like Eden would admire, he thought: leaden with concepts, light on entertainment. Still, he liked the way Descartes treated the soul and the body as separate things. It read to him like an owner’s manual—a step-by-step guide to the mechanics of emotions.
    By the time Oscar got to Harvey Road, it was very dark, and the flickering security light on the house across from Eden’s gave the whole street a haunting neon shine. Marcus answered the door and showed him inside. ‘What’s it like out there?’ he asked. ‘The radio said it might hail tonight. Any sign of it?’
    ‘Not that I could tell.’
    ‘Hard to know when hail is coming, I suppose. I wonder how they predict these things, these weathermen. No