Read Online The Hope by James Lovegrove - Free Book Online Page B

the transformation of his expression as he turned round, from innocence to delight, was so marked that it might appear contrived, even unreal.
    “Angel! Baby! I’ve been looking for you all over. I didn’t see you there. Hey, you look beautiful. Has anyone ever told you that?” She let him plant his lips on hers. He held her face gently. His irises were screwed tightly around pupils no larger than a full stop.
    “I want some … you know, shit.” There you go, be honest with him. Honesty’s the best policy. Push made the drugs himself, using whatever was available, mainly salt and seagull droppings. He was a devout advocate of the hallucinatory properties of guano.
    “You want some you know shit, do you?” he mimicked in falsetto as he led her to one corner where the music was fractionally less deafening and the shadows would hide a man’s face. He sat her down beside him.
    “Why did you go this morning?” she asked.
    “Business. You know the sort of thing. I’m a busy man. Busy, busy. And besides, you were sleeping like a baby. That was good shit I gave you, hey? I don’t jerk you around, do I now? I respect you too much.”
    “It’s just... Well, I don’t know. I think… No.”
    “What is it, baby? You can tell me. We should be able to tell each other everything.”
    “Do you like me?”
    “Of course I do.”
    “Really like me?” She took his hand. This startled him as much as it would if she had put her hand down the front of his trousers in public. Things, he decided, were getting way out of control. His expression transformed again as if made from mercury. His lips curled and his eyelids narrowed.
    “Listen, bitch, stop bothering me, all right? I’m fed up with you. I’m sick of you. You bore me. Leave me alone. It’s over. OK? Over.”
    The music thundered in Angel’s ears and beneath it she thought she could hear the angry rumble of the Hope ’s engines, growing louder, and it seemed that the day everyone prophesied, the day when the engines would burn out and explode, had at last arrived.
    “OK,” she said.
    She brushed her hand across his face. She thought she brushed her hand across his face. She couldn’t really tell because she was in the eye of a howling storm. She realised she had in fact raked her nails into Push’s eyes and he was bent double in agony and screaming, “I’m blind! The slut’s blinded me!”, and although there was a lot of blood she could not tell if this was true or not, because Push was a bit of a liar, wasn’t he? Her hands had only really brushed his face, hadn’t they?
    At that moment a record came to its end and the conversation, which would normally rush in to fill the gap like the Red Sea on the heads of the Egyptians, petered out as people sensed something was happening and looked unerringly towards where it was happening.
    Push kept up an uncomprehending wailing and Angel stood with watery streaks of blood on her fingers.
    “Christ, Angel, what the fuck’ve you done?” Gilette’s voice, its revulsion undisguised. A drumbeat burst open a song over the silence and Angel was aware how people were watching her, how their dumbstruck curiosity was as insulting as the way Push had spoken to her.
    Words came from her mouth to be flung at the wall of eyes and faces, some known, some strange: “Screw you! Screw you all!”
    She found herself outside and running along the deck through the dismal rain and there was no sense of direction other than a need to go upward, upward and out of there, to climb staircases and scale ladders until the Hope dropped away beneath her and she would reach heaven. She climbed stairs past signs which read “N DECK” and “K DECK” and “E DECK”, and she had a vague idea that when she reached the top she would fling herself off into space, end her life in a final ecstatic free-fall, better than any bird-turd drug. She would dive into the ocean as she’d often dreamed of doing and kiss the safety of its