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

enduring memory, and there was only one way she’d ever have been able to describe it.

Arts and crafts class. Two years prior. Christmas. ‘Make a Santa,’ Mr Feldman mumbled as he sank into the chair behind his desk, a newspaper rising in front of his face. Every manner of sculpture was produced that afternoon, mostly as far from the intended Santa as possible. Renata had driven her tiny hands into the bucket labelled PLASTICINE – RED a little too late, and they came back with nothing. Same with the WHITE bucket. The putty was in everyone’s hands but hers. Scraping several empty buckets, she’d managed to gather just enough Plasticine to warrant an attempt at the given brief, albeit in a sickly yellowish-green.

The image of that day’s creation re-emerged the night she witnessed her mother slumped over the typewriter. The Plasticine figure had meant to be standing upright, but upon returning from lunch break she’d found a Daliesque creature drooping forward, perhaps from the overhead heating, or the knock of another child. Or, more likely, simply from Renata’s lack of innate engineering ability.

Every iota of the yellowish-green Santa seemed to be pulled forwards and down; even the carefully sculpted fingers stretched towards some invisible treasure. Its head, top-heavy and insufficiently supported, bent as if in search of a lost contact lens. Its whole being was both pushed and pulled down, and it was with this push and pull Renata witnessed for that brief moment her mother falling into the typewriter. There was the side of her mother under tyrannical rule, there was that exhaust pipe of childhood regression, and then there was this.

Purpose.

She saw the woman’s index fingers stabbing the keys like crazed woodpeckers. She saw the chair slid so far back in accumulated tension that her behind barely remained seated. She saw eyes reaching out from their sockets as if handing the contents of her head straight over to the paper. Her mother, like gravity-stricken Plasticine, had fallen further and further into the keys, diving into the typewriter.

Renata had stared in awe. At the machine her mother was strong. A tornado could have swept the house away and those fingers would have kept on pecking, oblivious. It possessed her, and she possessed it.

But now she was dead, burnt alive by him. And tonight, in this basement with this brutalised girl, it possessed Renata.

Whatever her mother hammered out that night, and others like it, would never be read. Romance stories, she guessed, in the same vein as the books banished to this place. That banishment, however, had proven too tame for her mother’s writings, which ended up in the fireplace during one of her father’s particularly vicious rampages. No, her mother’s legacy at the hands of this typewriter wasn’t to be in her writings, but in Renata’s vision of her that night, lost in the machine’s spell.

As Renata had told the little moth, she really did struggle with the first word. She knew what she wanted to say, of course. The noose had squeezed that from her. As she’d hung, the sudden, shattering understanding of what must be done had exploded from her. She knew exactly how this story was to play out.

She thought of this strange career she’d forged, nothing more than manipulation on a professional level. Through the same recycled plots and cheap language she’d led along the mindless cattle of her readership. Their troughs had always needed refilled with that same old swill, book after book, year after year. The clichés, tired tropes, the need to love vicariously through another; it all seemed so distant now. For the first time in her life she had something real to write about, as real as her mother melting over these keys all those years ago. She’d do as Rye had. She’d make truth her muse.

She’d manipulated before. Now, she’d manipulate again. He’d torn her world apart. Now, with words, she’d return the favour.

Yet, despite Renata’s conviction, her fingers remained locked above the keys as if sealed by rust. The words were there, ready, begging to be born. Her fingers were desperate to give, as the keys were desperate to receive, just like lovers ripe and ready to seal their lust. But nothing came.

She looked over her shoulder, wiping her hands on a wet wipe. Unconsciousness had finally taken Sandie. Renata peered at the wound stagnating in the girl’s knee. Upon the black laceration she saw movement.

Two moths sat upon the exposed flesh, deep in concentration, hard at work, enjoying the task at hand. They were feeding.

Sandie twitched.

Renata stared.

The girl looked down at the wound through half-open eyelids. She jerked, then tightened her hands around the arms of the chair as the insects gorged on her blood. Her mouth dilated like the aperture of a lens, the intended scream replaced by a spray of vomit over her legs. The moths vacated their dinner. She wept.

Renata’s eyes widened.

Suddenly the words came.

She would begin with the knives.

Her fingers began typing of their own volition, sentences appearing on the page before she’d even registered the sudden tapping. All she had to do was hold her fingers to the keys and the words erupted before her. The calculation and arrangement of that stunted airport fodder was gone; only truth remained. The same truth he’d so arrogantly pursued? Probably not, but he’d get it anyway.

To the typewriter’s side sat the beginnings of the girl’s diary entries, to the other her mother’s fabric scissors, encrusted with Sandie’s blood. Renata’s periphery collapsed as she typed, the room falling out of focus, until she was staring down a tunnel onto the page. The words were all that remained. That, and the girl’s sobbing.

So she wrote.

For Quentin, she wrote.

26

‘Good evening, Miss Wakefield,’ said Detective O’Connell.

The man stood just outside the porch’s overhang, his tatty umbrella doing little to keep him dry. Rain