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

which caused grown men to hold their tongues and divert their gaze. The underbite protruded even further in his old age, seemingly reaching up for those wild, arched eyebrows – eyebrows of the same faded copper as the thin smattering of hair on his scabby head. His face looked like it had been smashed then glued back together, a roadmap of wrinkles consuming every inch of skin. As for his once-broad shoulders, they’d shrivelled to resemble a scrawny clothes hanger upon which sat his quivering head in place of a hook. The tattered clerical collar hung loose around his throat, beneath which threadbare robes sagged over a wasted body. Youth had abandoned Thomas totally. Although his shell was in tatters, the same man from her childhood lurked inside, fingers forever locked in that twitching fist. Her mother had made her promise to take care of this man should anything ever happen to her, but all Renata saw in that reeking armchair was a monster.

And tonight, the crispy remains of Sylvia Wakefield cast to the earth, here they were, father and daughter. With the carrots cut and potatoes peeled, Renata stood simmering water over the hot stove, staring into a bubbling oblivion. She stepped to the sink and turned the tap. Rubbing her hands under steaming water, she thought of the coffin, pressed down this very moment by six feet of soil. That sweet six feet should have been hers, it was meant to be hers, yet somehow her mother had taken her place, and she’d taken her mother’s place: by the stove, cooking for a monster.

It would have held.

Stonemount Central crept back into her mind. The thought of those eyes – those watching, scrutinising eyes – caused her heartbeat to quicken, her mouth to dry. She forced her thoughts back to those long, white corridors. Those sweet, serene corridors…

She calmed.

It hadn’t always been this way. Once, she’d been indifferent to the presence of others. She’d lived happily outside the waters of her mind, introversion a concept of no consequence. Everything had changed when her father moved them to the new house. The first time he’d raised his fist to the girl marked her permanent relocation to these waters, the never-ending narrative of her thoughts becoming her only place of peace.

Time marched on and reality transposed from the outside in. Thoughts and dreams and stories became the only plane in which she felt sane, her head breaking the water’s surface only when unavoidable.

Will you please pay attention in class?

The waters would part.

What did you learn in school today, girl?

She’d peer out.

My love, they’re just bruises. He would never hurt us, not really.

Back under she’d go.

It was this introversion she had to thank for her profession; her life as a novelist was down entirely to the waters of her mind, her font of fiction. This career in romantic literature was, in turn, to thank for her life of reclusion. It was also responsible for her sole experience of that thing called love – not that that had ever shown itself outside the pages of her paperbacks.

By the time they’d told her she was finally well enough to conclude her years in hospital following the crash, it had been obvious to all she was destined to live apart from the world, away from the pain that plagued her when around other human beings. Five of her novels had been published before even leaving care, and these provided her with sizeable unspent savings. Options, her doctors had called them. The option she’d suggested had been received surprisingly well, so long as she found her way back for regular checkups when instructed. What she’d proposed may even be for the best, they’d said. They were right. It had been for the best.

A two-hundred-year-old cottage on a secluded, unpopulated island in the Outer Hebrides off the west coast of Scotland – unnamed, save for the unofficial title afforded by neighbouring islands: Neo-Thorrach. Gaelic for ‘infertile’, the nickname originally referred the island’s inability to grow anything of any value to anyone, leading to its lack of habitation. Once word got around of the strange hermit lady in residence upon Neo-Thorrach, the name took on a dual meaning as the bored children of the islands concocted stories of the woman. The ‘Neo-Thorrach Buidseach’, she came to be called. The ‘Infertile Witch’. She was no witch, though. Far less glamorous. The sole inhabitant of Neo-Thorrach was nothing more than a second-rate romance writer who needed to be alone with her thoughts and live out her days at her Adler typewriter. Away from the eyes.

Now, in the presence of just two blind eyes, Renata and her father dined in silence. She ate little, her decade and a half of hospital food having permanently crippled her appetite in the years since. Her courage to mention Noah remained as absent as her hunger.

Thomas’s shaking grew worse as the evening wore on. She sat watching his trembling frame, curling her fingers into a fist to stab uncut nails into the palms of her hands. She looked at his twisting, yellowed talons. Maybe they weren’t so different, after all. Had she intended to give herself a few more decades, could this have been a window into the future she’d planned to abandon? It didn’t matter. Soon, nothing would matter. Disease and degeneration had picked away at her father through the years like a fussy eater, but something with a far greater appetite had torn into Renata. Thomas’s flesh was on a steady decline, but Renata’s once creative mind was ravaged; somewhere along the line, her gift for writing had flown from the tiny island of Neo-Thorrach, never to be seen again. For days at a time she’d sat at that typewriter, the rain and gales battering the stone walls of her cottage as doggedly as her publisher’s written demands for more cheap romance.

There was no escaping