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

four drill holes, and falls into a corner where she wraps her body into a tight ball on the floor. She imagines Noah giggling outside, that machine gun snigger he saves for such occasions.

‘Ee-ee-eeee!’

Her crypt is cold and unforgiving, but she is not alone. One of those stupid moths sits on the floor under a shelf. Is it dead? Hopefully. She hates those damned things, always eating through her clothes and flapping in her face just when she’s about to fall sleep. She hates them. She hates her brother, too. She hates this house and everything in it.

Is it dead? Maybe she wishes it was.

She reaches.

The door opens.

‘Rennie, what are you doing in here?’ her mother asks, tired eyes scanning the shelves for a platter of party food. ‘Come on, out you come.’

‘Why Lenata do that, Mummy?’ says the boy. His vacuous eyes lock on the girl. ‘Silly Lenata.’

The girl scrambles to her feet and follows her mother out of the larder, glancing back at the moth. The sound of a motor approaches from outside, accompanied by cheering.

‘It’s time, children!’ says their mother, smile locked in position. ‘Come, hurry! It’s time!’ She picks up Noah – way too big to be picked up – and, balancing the platter in her other hand, struggles through the house.

Wiping her eyes, the girl steps into the empty living room and looks through the window. She sees the guests ushering Thomas Wakefield to the dark blue Ford Cortina awaiting him, a giant red ribbon tied around the width and length of the vehicle. Its bow ripples in the breeze.

‘It’s from us all!’ cries Mrs Moncrieff. ‘For all you’ve done for the town!’

‘Thank you, Vicar!’ calls Mr Cooper.

‘God bless you!’

‘You deserve it, Mr Wakefield!’

Thomas turns to the crowd, his red hair glistening in the afternoon sun. ‘It’s my son, Noah, you should be thanking. He’s made me what I am.’ The boy grins through a mud-streaked face. ‘And where, may I ask, is his car? It’s his birthday, after all.’

The girl watches from the window as frenzied laughter erupts. She returns to the kitchen, where her eyes fall on Samson’s food bowl. The dog’s canned breakfast still lies within, brown stripes crosshatching the syrupy mush. Her mother’s orange fabric scissors sit on the floor by the bowl’s side, their blades lined with Samson’s breakfast. She looks back to the bowl.

The brown stripes are her papers, cut into ribbons and prodded into the rancid swill.

The shaken Cola bottle of rage bubbles up once again.

At the sight of her work degraded and vulgarised, something closes within her. The girl will write again – she will make a living as an author – but her facility for true inspiration shall remain in that bowl of festering meat until the diary reawakens, until the nightmares cease forever, until the spade fulfils its final purpose.

An unthinkable purpose.

She stares at the bowl in disbelief. From behind her, sniggering. She turns to see the boy standing in the doorway, unable to contain himself.

‘Ee-ee-eeee!’

She thinks of the moth in the larder. How easy it would have been to—

‘Noah, my little munchkin! There you are!’

‘Ee-ee-eeee!’

It would have taken only two fingers.

‘There’s more presents! The guests are waiting!’

‘Ee-ee-eeee!’

Easy, so very easy.

‘Up we go!’ The woman once again heaves the boy into her arms and returns to the chattering guests. The girl watches the back of her mother’s damned immaculate hair as she walks away. For a moment, she wishes the bruises would return. When there were bruises, there were words. Now that the worm is here, now that the late-night shouting has ended, ever since rosy pink replaced black and blue, her mother is just another distant presence, another pair of eyes to forget the girl’s existence.

The boy looks back over his mummy’s shoulder, his glare locking onto the girl. His eyes cut through her.

Like knives.

He smiles.

She grabs her rucksack and runs for the back door. She must get out. She must get to the only place she knows is safe.

No one notices.

No one follows.

No one cares.

‘Ee-ee-eeee!’

She runs.

14

The flames fell from above, an ocean of fire whose defiance of gravity finally tired. Black oil gushed from her hands. The road beneath the car ripped then exploded.

The dreams were getting worse.

Their details used to fall away from her upon waking like sand in an hourglass, but you can’t dream the same dream for nearly thirty years without eventually piecing it together. By now she could remember the jigsaw of her dreams vividly; the red spade, the speeding car, the country roads, and her oily hands were all clear to her. What was unclear was whether the jumbled puzzle related to her accident or the cover of that damned book. Or neither. Or both.

Then there were the stabbing pains, the same pains she was so intimately accustomed to from her waking world. Yet in the dreams, thirteen stabs. Always thirteen stabs.

Only one jet-black hand, dripping with tar, gripped the wheel this time. The other reached for the sole occupant of the passenger seat: the red spade. Noah’s red spade.

Burning fields sailed past the car, her father’s Ford Cortina. She felt its chassis tremble then fall away. Despite its crumbling, the car somehow raged on. And all the while: One… Five… Nine… The stabbing pains continued with their usual, terrible regularity.

That vague yellow shape rose before her in the mist, remaining in place irrespective of her speed, beckoning her into its fold.

Ten

The wheel broke from the dashboard and flew from her oily hands into a fireball behind her. The spade remained in her black grasp.

Eleven

The last remaining remnant of the car went spinning into the sky, a Catherine wheel of flames. Somehow her body’s trajectory continued.