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

her eyes, allowing an unfilled silence to linger. ‘What do you want?’ the girl demanded.

She stepped to the desk behind Sandie’s chair and set the tray down, then spoke to the back of the teenager’s head. ‘I meant to ask, what hand do you write with?’

Sandie twisted round, but Renata remained out of sight. ‘What? Why are you—’

A small, silk-bound diary fell on her lap. ‘I was hoping you’d write a journal for me, Sandie.’

‘I…I don’t understand, Renata,’ she stammered, head shaking. ‘I just want to—’

‘Actually, it was mine long ago,’ Renata continued. ‘I’d have been about your age. In its pages I recorded my days, but in those days there was no comfort.’ She stepped in front of Sandie. ‘Fiction became my comfort. The entries became less about my life and more about the lives I invented, but what I wrote is of no significance.’ She placed a finger under the girl’s chin. ‘You see, all that matters now is what you’ll write.’ Tears traced Sandie’s cheeks. ‘Now, sorry to keep asking, but what hand do you write with?’

‘Left,’ she whimpered.

Renata produced her mother’s orange-handled fabric scissors, blades like garden shears, and snipped the cable tie of Sandie’s left wrist. Renata opened the diary on the girl’s lap, dropped a pen on the blank page, then stepped back.

‘Please, write.’

She’s told me to write in this diary and to tell whoever reads it to ignore the dates. I dunno what else to write except my name is Sandie Rye, aged 19, daughter of Quentin C. Rye. I’m confused and scared but my captor is treating me well and she should know I’ll cooperate any way she wants and my parents are very important people and they’ll give her anything she

The pen dropped as the closed blades of the scissors stabbed through the side of Sandie’s knee, lodging behind bone. Her brain scrambled to process the sudden wall of agony, a roar of pain exploding from her mouth before the pen hit the concrete. In her head, the scream seemed somehow detached, lingering abstractly in the distance before finally rushing in as if through an opened airlock. The girl became a vessel of suffering, anguish incarnate. Her wailing dominated the small, narrow space. Faintly, the midnight tolls of the clock tower could be heard filling the fields.

Renata held the closed blades in place behind Sandie’s kneecap, whilst also holding the girl’s free hand against the arm of the chair. The teenager looked down at the orange handles fastened to the side of her knee, then vomited, undigested baguette bursting over Renata’s shoulder. Urine merged with the current of blood streaming down her legs.

‘You fucking PSYCHO,’ screamed Sandie. ‘What do you WANT?! I’ll fucking—’ She gagged before she could finish the sentence, her body convulsing into a rage of spasms.

‘Such furious fluttering,’ whispered Renata. ‘Fear not, little moth. I, too, struggle with the first word.’ She leant in, ignoring the girl’s lashing free hand, and clenched both handles of the still-impaled blades, one in each fist.

‘What do I want? I’m sorry, dear child, but I want you to try harder.’

She heaved the scissors apart.

help me please whoever reads this it hurts my leg she stabbed me its I dont know why please

 

what the fuck do you want me to write everything keeps going black and

 

I keep passing out but she wakes me and makes me write I dont know what to say shes fucking insane whoever reads this my name is Sandie Rye please God help me someone anyone please

25

Her mother, now dead, burnt alive by him, had slinked around the house like a guilty dog. Even as a child the terror under which Sylvia Wakefield lived was obvious to Renata. The real shock had been the contrast between life under Thomas’s rule and who Sylvia became when he left on ministerial duties, when her father would take the Ford Cortina to Stonemount, or south of the Crove to smaller parishes such as Claybeck or Tull Pyke. Sometimes, with a couple of days to themselves, the real Sylvia Wakefield could finally surface as if emerging from hibernation. Mother and daughter would bake all day, laughter and song filling the kitchen as clouds of flour led to Samson’s inevitable sneezing. As Renata grew older, it became obvious these times were acts of reversion, a kind of ritualistic regression for her mother from her current life back to childhood. She needs this, she would think as balls of dough flew across the kitchen. This is like the exhaust pipe of Father’s car, letting it all out. She needs this.

Upon his return, her mother’s exuberance would instantly dissolve. The front door’s slam would mark the lowering of her gaze and the falling of her smile back into calculated composure.

Yet there was another time, just one, when the real Sylvia Wakefield emerged, but not to laugh and sing and throw dough balls. She’d opened in another way, a deeper way, courtesy of this black beast of a machine which now sat before Renata some thirty years later in a basement she never knew existed.

Now that the burst dam of her subconscious let every memory flow free, she vividly recalled the dread of descending the staircase in the middle of the night, every step threatening to scream its treacherous creak through the walls to her father. She remembered one particular descent, successful – until she’d opened the lounge door to find someone there.

Luckily it had been the right someone.

Her mother had looked up from the typewriter with the same terror Renata felt descending the stairs: the terror of being found out. That horror quickly dissolved into a smile reserved only for her, but another moment stuck in her mind from that night, the briefest second before her mother looked up in dread. It was an