Free All Yours by Translated By Miranda France By (author) Pineiro Claudia Page B

ten in the morning. Lali had already left. She threw her bag down somewhere. Next she went to each window and lowered all the blinds until only a few shards of light penetrated the dark. She disconnected the telephone. Upstairs she repeated the same process. She looked at herself in her bedroom mirror. She went to the bathroom and searched in the cabinet for her tranquillizers. She shook the bottle, weighing up how many were inside. The tablets rattled in the still air; there were quite a few, at least half a bottle. She unscrewed the cap and tipped a few of them into the palm of her hand. Keeping two of them, she returned the rest to the bottle. These two she put in her mouth. She poured out some water. Before drinking it, she took one of the pills out of her mouth again and threw it into the lavatory. The other one she swallowed. Back downstairs. In the kitchen the breakfast things were still out. As if nothing had happened. She tried to wash a cup. But she ended up breaking it against the side of the sink. The handle flew off it and bounced three times on the tiled floor. She splashed water onto her face and stood without moving for a while, with her face wet. Then she dried it with a damp tea towel. She felt revulsion. She wept. She placed all the other breakfast things in the sink, including the butter dish containing melting butter. She went to the living room. She wanted to go to the garage, but she went to the living room. She walked around the coffee table several times. She poured herself a whisky and drank it, without putting the bottle back on the bar. She put the glass down. But not the bottle. She went outside, to the garage. She walked inside and, pulling the door closed behind her, walked straight to the back wall. She pulled out the brick, meaning to take out the things that were hidden behind the brick, but she didn’t do this. She left everything as it was. She went back to the kitchen and looked for some rubber gloves. Nowhere to be seen. Roughly she pushed the breakfast cups in the sink to one side and found the gloves underneath everything. Wet and dirty. She washed and dried them. She returned to the garage. Wearing the gloves. Once again, she made for the back wall. She took out the things from their hiding place behind the brick. She looked for somewhere else to put them. She found the tool box. She threw its contents onto the floor. She put in Truelove’s letters, the tickets to Rio, the nude photographs of Ernesto, the inscribed box of condoms, and locked it. The rest she put back in the hollow then returned the brick to its place. All that remained was the revolver. She went to her car and opened the boot. She took out the wheel and there it was, where she had put it on the day she brought it from Alicia’s house. Gently, respectfully almost, she lifted it out. Then she put it in the tool box. She left the garage with the box in one hand and the bottle of whisky in the other. She took the whisky back to the bar, and left the tool box there. She went to the kitchen. She returned the gloves to the sink. She turned on the tap and washed her face with plenty of cold water.
    Then, only then, did she decide to reconsider her options – and start again.

23
    Ernesto and Charo had gone up the escalator to departures, kissing each other.
    There were no two ways about it – I had seen this with my own two eyes. And the eyes do not lie. Unless you close them, I suppose! But it was too late for that. I had to face up to this bombshell. But just because I had seen Ernesto and Charo kissing on the escalator, that didn’t mean I understood all the other elements of the story. There were so many different alternative versions. I spent the rest of that day weighing them up, looking for evidence to support them, or inconsistencies that ruled them out. By mid-afternoon, there was such a tangle in my head that the different possibilities had all become muddled and I couldn’t remember which ones I had ruled out