Read Online Whispers Through a Megaphone by Rachel Elliott - Free Book Online Page A

has never invited him in before. “Are you quite sure?”
    She nods. Two minutes later, Boo’s trainers are positioned neatly by the back door and he is sitting at the dining table, drinking tea, while Miriam explains that it is almost time.
    “Almost time for what, Miriam?”
    “Time for me to leave the house.”
    Boo looks disappointed. “You’re a mystery to me,” he says.
    “Am I?”
    “Yes. There are many things I’d like to ask you.”
    “Really?”
    He nods. “I often wonder about your voice. Perhaps you have a medical condition that makes you speak so quietly? I wonder about your agoraphobia too.”
    “I’m not agoraphobic.”
    “Oh.”
    Miriam takes a large mouthful of tea, too much to swallow at once. She looks like she is gargling. Thunderous gulps inside her head. The storm is always close. Don’t forget your umbrella .
    “I just assumed.”
    “I’m not scared of public spaces.”
    “That’s good.”
    She remembers the last time she was outside. The rain and the darkness as she ran home. The rainbow she saw through the kitchen window.
    Boo waits, hoping that this conversational tap is all it will take to make Miriam’s psyche crack open like a nut. He thinks of macadamia nuts, of the plantation he worked at while travelling around Australia in his twenties, of losing his virginity ( finally! Such a relief to be rid of it, thank you Dougie thank you ) to a woman who worked for the Australian Macadamia Society. (Dougie’s parents had been expecting a boy called Douglas, and when they looked at their new baby and said that’s not our Dougie, the baby opened her eyes as if to say yes, it’s me, I’m your Dougie, it’s me .)
    “Also, there’s no medical condition,” Miriam says.
    Boo isn’t listening. He is on the other side of the world with Dougie, drinking peppermint tea while she lists the health benefits of macadamia nuts. Funny the things you remember. Funny the things you forget. He wonders what Dougie is doing now, at this very second, and whether she still dresses like a cowgirl. She used to call him Boo-Boo. As in Boo-Boo Bear.
    “Are you all right?” Miriam says. She holds up a plate of malted milk biscuits.
    “I’m so sorry. What were we saying?” He takes a biscuit and bites it in half.
    “Nothing really,” she says, noticing the pinkness of Boo’s cheeks.
    “Life is short,” he says.
    “Yes.”
    “People come and go and then it’s too late.”
    Miriam takes another malted milk biscuit.
    “So what the hell,” Boo says. He puts down his cup and brushes the crumbs from his tracksuit bottoms. “I’m just going to ask you, before it’s too late,” he says. “Before you leave the house and meet someone else.”
    Someone else?
    Miriam looks at the cow on the biscuit, notices its head hanging low. She puts it back on the plate.
    “May I take you out for dinner one evening?” Boo asks.
    The solitary tear that runs down her face is not the response he was hoping for. Miriam begins to sob. She covers her face with her hands, but not completely, and one eye peeps at him through her fingers. Boo is terrified, guilty, not sure what’s going on. He had never intended to upset her, but here she is with a dripping nose and red eyes, crying in the way that a child might cry after being left alone for too long.
    “I’m so sorry,” he says, leaning forward to touch her hand. “What did I do?”
    She tries to speak through the sobbing but she can’t breathe. Boo waits. He should never have been so impulsive—broken people don’t respond well to impulsiveness. He wonders whether it would be insensitive to eat a biscuit.
    Finally, the tears stop. They look at each other. Boo knows that Miriam is not going to say yes. She is not going to join him for dinner. He stands up, puts his arm around her shoulders and gives her a squeeze. She buries her wet face in his tracksuit top.
    “You treated me like a normal person,” she says, before filling the house with a low moan