Read Online The Find by Kathy Page - Free Book Online Page A

fucking useless factoid there was to know and be part of the craziest things without getting off his chair: a group on the Net — crazies who believed that some people would soon have chips in their brains and skeletons made out of titanium, and they would be the ones that lasted when the planet started to cook. It was fun to think that way for a change instead of just feeling scared about how the icecaps were melting and the sea levels rising and the prairies turning to dust and the forests being cut down or eaten by beetles and the fish having weird babies and cancer being endemic because of all the chemicals, and how before long there wouldn’t be enough food to go around and now there was a whole new load of shit in the Middle East and how awful it all was — but there was nothing to be done about any of it because the multinationals who ran the planet didn’t give a fuck and had the governments completely in their hands... It must make a change to feel almost on top of things, to look at a normal person, Lauren, say, and have all that going on in the back of your head while you spoke to them and think, but I will survive .

8
    â€” ♦ —
    ANNA HAD WOKEN FROM A DREAM about Mike: they were outside a hotel that was the Mountain View but even more run down; she’d hit him and he’d fallen, crumpled to the ground and he lay there, not moving, eyes closed, blood gushing out of his nose. She was on her knees beside him, saying his name and trying to take his pulse when his eyes sprang open and he reared up, grabbing her arm... And now the darkness and terror of that moment floated somewhere between her and the calm, orderly room she sat in, and the sound of her own voice tearing at its edges made her feel more desperate still.
    â€˜I already know,’ Sheila said. A tiny woman, the complete physical opposite of her husband, Ray, the pollen specialist, she was impeccably put together in shades of dark red and cream, her hair freshly tinted and styled. She set her coffee down on a mat on her desk.
    â€˜We’ll support you fully, of course. Now,’ Sheila said, ‘let’s talk around this. Is there any background, anything that you could think of which might have precipitated all this?’
    Anna bent to pick a paperclip from the floor; wanted to cry, did she have to explain and justify heself to anyone who asked?
    I hit him : she did not want to say that. The whole of her resisted it, that bit in particular.
    Sheila waited.
    â€˜We did have a disagreement after the find. But it was absolutely nothing to do with the find itself.’ Sheila waited.
    â€˜In confidence,’ Anna told her, ‘he was bothering me. And I said no, but he grabbed hold of me. And so, in the heat of the moment, I — struck him in the face, and I made a real mess of it.’ Her own face was a mess too, now, flushed, wet: she hid it in her hands. Sheila’s touch on her shoulder made her jump.
    â€˜Did you report it?’ Sheila said as she squatted down next to Anna.
    â€˜Did I what ? I’ve tried to apologise, but he won’t accept it.’
    â€˜Apologise? It sounds as if there was kind of a sexual assault. So — well, that’s something that should be reported.’ A sexual assault ? For the first time Anna looked properly at Sheila, who had not said only a very sick person would hit a man like that , who peered back at her, her mouth soft, her neatly shaped eyebrows raised in concern.
    â€˜Even now,’ Sheila said, ‘you should make a statement to the RCMP.’
    â€˜But it was a misunderstanding. It may even have nothing to do with what’s happening with the specimen... Well, it’s connected, in that he’s angry, but I don’t want to blow it up out of proportion, not more than it already is.’
    Sheila stood and went back to her chair.
    â€˜Things are already rather out of hand, don’t you think? It looks to me as if