For Rye Gavin Gardiner (best book club books for discussion TXT) 📖

‘And now they come to this town with their cheap thrills and actress whores and…’

Still nothing.

‘…they soil this once great country with their filth. Blasphemy, it’s nothing short of…’

A moth landed on the blank page.

‘…a slap in the face of God. Let the will of their Creator strike them down. Let me tell you, girl…’

The insect stood frozen.

‘…for these heathens, for all of us…’

It would be so easy.

‘…in the name of the Father…’

She reached for it.

‘…the flood is coming.’

Its brown abdomen crushed between her fingers.

As if his visionless eyes had seen, Thomas fell silent. Samson twitched. The question of what made her do it didn’t present itself as she wiped the pulp on her skirt. She was too taken by the bubbling over of her mind, too taken by the pen that suddenly and furiously began filling the page. Aside from the crackling fire, the only sound in the room was the scratching of pen on paper.

She wrote.

Thomas’s spiels resumed in fits and bursts. And yet, as this sudden and almighty inspiration flooded from the pen, his words passed around her like water bypassing a rock.

She reached the end of the final page of script after three hours of the pen’s pouring, then sat back to look at her jagged scrawls. It wasn’t until she turned back to the first page that she was reminded of what had sparked this torrent of activity. At the top of the page, above the first words of her maniacally scratched work, lay soaked into the paper a tiny wet spot: the dying juices of a moth. She looked at her fingers in horror – more dying juice – and raced to the sink in the kitchen.

Her father, having succumbed to a quivering half-sleep, choked back to life. ‘Girl,’ he shouted through to her, his words a froth of confusion, ‘what…where’s the…get the…’

She shut off the tap and returned to Thomas, slowly drying her hands. She fixed her gaze on the man’s eyes. They were as misty as the fields.

‘He’s not coming back, is he?’ she said. His unseeing stare clamped around her as that ragged fingernail began its incessant tapping and scratching on the arm of his chair. ‘I need to know, Father. If Noah isn’t around then I have to deal with your care myself.’

‘A pig.’

She looked blankly. ‘Father?’

‘She never stopped believing you’d come back,’ he croaked.

Renata felt a mass in her chest, an empty solidity rising to her throat as the face of Sylvia Wakefield materialised in her mind.

Midnight, midnight; it’s your turn…

Suddenly the water battered the rock. She felt the familiar stab of nervous fingernails in her scabby palms. Tears begged to be born in her eyes.

‘I knew you were gone,’ he trembled, ‘just like your brother. And when I made efforts – oh, such efforts – to…convince her, she squealed—’

He smiled.

‘—like a pig.’

So out the front door and through fog-drenched fields she ran. She wasn’t meant to be here. The beam would have held, it would have taken her weight. By now, her neck should have been snapped. It would have held. There was nothing keeping her here, only some ancient promise made to a dead woman. There was nothing keeping her anywhere.

Except Quentin.

Tears fell to the fields speeding under her trailing skirt. For a time, the thickening mist rendered both the Wakefield house and the town ahead invisible. Like a sailor lost at sea, she registered a momentary loss of orientation, during which all sense of direction seemed to dissolve. She ran through space, a white, smoky space. The misty vacuum was a microcosm, her life miniaturised. The walls of fog became the cottage on Neo-Thorrach where she’d hidden herself, the passing grass the stream of dim-witted words she’d churned out endlessly for a dim-witted readership. She clenched her eyes shut as she ran; maybe the fog and the grass could be something else? Maybe they could be white, endless corridors? Pure, simple, everything in its place. No disorder, no disaster.

She opened her eyes and saw the town materialising from the abyss ahead. Millbury Peak still had her.

Quentin’s rented manor finally came into view. She made a beeline for the Georgian building, scrambling down its driveway and thumping on the front door. She suddenly wondered where she’d go if there was no answer. The clock tower, no doubt. It would be freezing tonight, but she couldn’t go back to Father. He wasn’t a moth she could extinguish with two fingers. He was a thread of fear running from her childhood to this very moment, except the fear was changing. She was still a cowering child waiting for the shouting to stop, but the child was angry. She wondered if this rage had replaced the fear, but no, she was still afraid of Thomas Wakefield, of Millbury Peak, of everyone she met.

But there was hope. Somewhere alongside the fear and the anger and whatever else boiled inside of her there was another man, the thought of whom convinced her she could be alright – maybe even normal. This man made her feel like a human being, as opposed to an imposter in a world belonging to everyone but her.

Quentin opened the door.

Part of her felt ridiculous collapsing into his arms, like a hopeless, romance-saves-all cliché from one of her budget potboilers. Another part felt as she had when their lips had met, when his forehead had pressed into hers in that expression of unadulterated relief; as she had when his hand slid under the fabric of her skirt, his warmth meeting hers; as when she’d lay beneath him, her mind swimming in a blend of anxious terror (there must be some mistake) and complete trust. She felt as she had when watching herself give to him her very being, just as