Read Online The Lightning Cage by Alan Wall - Free Book Online

intently when he came on his weekly visits to see his son, and saw the look in the boy’s eyes as he welcomed his daddy into the little space of his life.
    I hadn’t started all this around me, you see. I needed to plan things, to get them right. I couldn’t just drop into the middle of the lives of so many other people and begin as though from the beginning. I hadn’t yet got to the beginning, so how was I supposed to get started?
    â€˜I just need some time to think things through,’ I said as I stood on the doorstep with my bags in my hand.
    â€˜I’m not expecting you back, Chris,’ Jane said quietly. ‘We’ll miss you.’ As I said, she was as intelligent in her mind as in her body. Didn’t seem to need to divide things up between them. And she was right, of course: I didn’t go back. I thought of her often, and of the boy too, but I never did go back.
    After Jane, I watched myself. The minute anyone murmured between the sheets in a way that might end in a crescendo of ‘I want to have your baby’, I made sure I finished things quickly. The women who spent any time in my flat always remarked on its tidiness, impressed by how efficiently I conducted my domestic life. The cooking, the ironing, the cleaning, the pressed clothes hanging ready in the wardrobe.
    â€˜You don’t need a wife. Unlike most men, you don’t even need a housekeeper,’ Sally Leiris said on the day of her departure. ‘What do you need, Chris?’ And now it seemed I had suddenly decided the answer to that question must be Alice. Except that I hadn’t decided anything at all. For once, I had simply acted. Normally I only did that on my way out, not on my way in. But if I didn’t need a housekeeper, she certainly did. I had handed her my other set of keys, and had set to work with hammer and hooks and tacks, hanging her pictures on my walls. And when she said on that first night, ‘Do you want some spliff?’ I had nodded and said, ‘Why not?’
    There had been plenty of the stuff around up in Leeds when I had been there, but I’d only smoked a few times. I didn’t like tobacco for one thing and I was always particular about my physical health. We’d all get drunk from time to time, and that was enough. It turned out that I didn’t have to worry about the tobacco, since Alice rolled her joints using some herbal mix. And as I breathed deeply and the music opened up the space inside my head, I looked across at Alice, sitting at the table by the window, and realised that she was even more beautiful than I had thought. Beethoven’s Violin Concerto was playing and I was startled suddenly to hear the strings laughing and dancing one over another. Why had I never noticed that before?
    Alice had already set her easel up by the window and placed a primed canvas on it. She sat silently and stared through the glass. My flat was on the fifth floor and you could look out of the window and see across Battersea Park to the Peace Pagoda and the river and rows of houses beyond, including the house of Andrew and Helena, which now seemed like another country, one in which people spoke a different language entirely. I would take Alice to see them all the same. I could hardly keep her to myself up there for ever.
    Later that night Alice went to the fridge and left the door hanging open as she walked backwards away from it all.
    â€˜What’s the matter?’ I said.
    â€˜I can’t live in a house with meat in it, I should have told you. I’ll dream about it now. There’ll be blood in my sleep.’
    Half an hour later, I carried a large black bag containing all the meat in my fridge down the five flights of my block of flats, since there was no lift, and put them into the large bin at the back of the building. The price of Alice, I supposed.
    I prepared that brochure lovingly. The principal specified some piece of flat abstraction for the