Read Online The Gloaming by Melanie Finn - Free Book Online Page B

‘That’s my little plumpkin, oh, yes, my baby boy baby Mummy’s boy boy-joy.’ Then to me, adjusting her vocal dial from saccharine to smug: ‘Let me get Daddy for you.’
    In the pause that followed I suddenly remembered myself with my leg up on the bathroom vanity as I slipped in my diaphragm. This act of preparation aroused Tom; he always watched, saying, ‘Pilgrim, Pilgrim.’
    Now, he came on the line and said my name. ‘Pilgrim.’ There was no difference in his voice.
    â€˜Were you here?’ I tried to find my neutral tone.
    â€˜Here? Where?’
    â€˜Here in the flat in Arnau. This morning.’
    â€˜What are you talking about?’
    â€˜Was Elise here?’
    There was a pause, a patient sigh, ‘This is about Elise, then. Why on earth would Elise have gone to Arnau?’
    Why on earth. I wanted to take the phone and smash it again and again against the metal hull of the phone box until it broke.
    Even though he couldn’t see me, he said, ‘You need to get a hold of yourself, Pilgrim.’
    I hung up and began to walk home.
    Why on earth
.
    A car drove past and a young man honked, yelled
Mördende Hure
.
    In my kitchen, I picked up the cup with a pair of cooking tongs. I had the idea that I could call the police and have it fingerprinted—that sympathetic Sergeant Caspary. But my next thought was how I might seem to her: in the wake of the tragic incident I was concerned about a mysterious coffee cup in my sink. And I’d already proven the faultiness of my memory. She’d wonder if I’d drunk the coffee myself and forgotten about it, the way I forgot to pay the phone bill. Forgot killing three children.
    Killing three children.
    The words made no impression. Should I carve them into my arm with a knife?
    Sergeant Caspary would be sitting there, a frown afflicting her face. ‘The cup is yours but the coffee isn’t?’
    â€˜I don’t drink coffee,’ I would insist to her. ‘I don’t like coffee.’
    How could she be sure I was telling the truth? There was coffee in the cupboard. A cup with coffee in the sink. No evidence of a break-in, nothing taken. She might conclude I was a fantasist or a liar.
    And even though I
knew
I was neither, I felt a tearing, a leaking: if my memory was so unreliable, so ready to malfunction—e.g. the forgotten death of three children, the phone bill—then what else had I forgotten? Or simply misremembered?
    I could count on nothing. Had Tom and I lain upon the land? Had he said, ‘This is our land now’? Had we even been married? No physical trace of him remained in the flat, there was no ring upon my finger. Even photographs; there’d been so few, and these were packed away on Rue Saint-Léger. I had no proof of a twelve-year marriage, other than my impression of it.
    Had I made myself a cup of coffee? Did I like coffee?
    Facts slipped from my hands, swam away like eels.
    But I took hold of the cup. The cool curve of the ceramic surface, the neat arch of the handle, its whiteness. And inside, yes, the unmistakable coffee dregs that I had not made.
    Â 
Magulu, May 8
    I haven’t seen Dorothea for several days. The clinic has been closed. I ask Gladness to show me where she lives. She calls Samwelli and he nods at me. ‘
Njo, njo
.’ Come, come. I follow him out the back door and down a narrow alley between houses. These are mud and wattle with rough thatch roofs. He turns corners, but I’m able to keep a sense of where I am, for I can see the main road through gaps, and the roundabout with goats standing in the dry fountain.
    Dorothea’s house is a real house: made from breeze-blocks with a tin roof and neat gutters connecting to a black plastic cistern. The door is painted the same pretty pale blue as the cross on the clinic door. Brown chickens peck at the ground. This has been swept to hard dirt, clean as a floor.
    The door opens and