Read Online White Queen by Gwyneth Jones - Free Book Online

the way. Or even very far.”
    “I didn’t know you were bisexual.”
    She had the nerve to find his plight funny.
    “Not in any of those files you’ve been tampering with, eh? I’m not. I was utterly gonzo.”
    His outburst had relieved the pressure momentarily. God bless words, he thought. Where would we be without them. He ought to leave now, find that doorway. But this thing had gone beyond mindless arousal. Brae’s body had acquired meaning beyond itself. He put his fists to his eyes: images of those country people in their pitifully decent poverty, thoughts of what the coming of the visitors might mean to them, to billions. His memories were not to be trusted—the car that whined and lay down like a dog, his daughter kidnapped. Yet there had been a meeting. He was convinced, right now at any rate. The world would be changed forever. But he would still be shut out. He wanted to be wrapped and hidden. Please. Let me come home.
    “Johnny, come here.”
    He was desperate enough to obey.
    She took his hand, and closed it over a small, slick package. It was a gesture he had only seen in risqué foreign films. Decent kids in New York didn’t need to be protected against casual pregnancy or disease. You got married, you stayed married: end of options. The touch of her hand, the sophisticated way she closed his fingers: the effect was incredibly erotic. His tongue was too thick for his mouth.
    “That won’t keep out the QV. Okay, you’re not risking your job. What about your life?”
    “I thought I’d made myself clear. I’ll try again. You turn me on. I’m forty seven years old. At my age one doesn’t hesitate when lightning strikes. You tell me you haven’t got QV: that’s enough. One takes the reasonable precautions, one takes one’s own risks. C’est tout simple, l’amour.”
    “Or am I too old? Is that it?”
    She laid his fist on her bare shoulder. He was in her space, and falling, dazed with gratitude.
    A strange thing happened then. Braemar was not, after all, tumbled in the bushes, as she had fully expected to be. As soon as they were in each other’s arms, the two figures stayed quite still: for so long it was as if they’d mysteriously found, these sparring strangers that nothing more needed to be done or said. Johnny sighed. Braemar stood and took his hand; they walked sedately into the hotel.
      
    She found a book in his bumbag: an ancient paperback, nearly a hundred years old, the pages protected by plastic film. He had a weakness for old books, that was in the files. “An abode without birds,” she read, “is like meat without seasoning. Such was not my abode, for I found myself suddenly neighbor to the birds; not by having imprisoned one, but having caged myself near them…”
    She remembered a babyfaced prince of that bizarre brief Camelot, twenty-first century New York, with his motorized skateboard and a rather sickening line in clean-kid arrogance. He always carried a silvery tool, stiffly prominent in a belt loop or his jeans pocket. To her unregenerate eye it looked like some kind of ancient druggie impedimenta. It was the shank of a coralin drill, the badge of the latest elite brotherhood, fusion of art and science; engineers of the word. And now. She wondered if Johnny was aware of the way he wore the ubiquitous crotch-bulge bumbag of a young adult male slung on his shoulder. Of course he knew. He wasn’t stupid, not at all.
    It was immeasurably touching, that the young exiled American should carry Walden in his pocket. The hunter who had been condemned to become one with his quarry: the birddog, caged among the singing birds. And trying to like it. Good boy.
    Saddest of all was his conviction that what had happened to him had been done deliberately. She thought how strangely the whole world spiraled back towards the mindset of old Africa. No weather anymore, only the effects of human villainy. No death except by witchcraft.
    Some people said the QV incident was invention