Free After You'd Gone by Maggie O'Farrell

clusters just below the surface like parachutes. Beyond them, I can make out the figures of my parents, distant and blurred, standing at the shore.
     
I know where I am. I know more than they think. Earlier today
     
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someone with an officious voice said, close to my ear, 'It is touch and go as to whether she will ever regain consciousness.' Touch and go. Makes it sound like a children's game.
Today I am bothered about the story of King Canute. (I say 'today' from habit - I have no idea if it is night or day or even how long I have been here. The strangest thing is that I sometimes have difficulty in remembering the names of things. Yesterday, or whenever it was, I couldn't remember the word for the wooden structure for sitting with four legs. I trawled through my memory and found I could recall de Saussure's semiotics theory, large chunks of King Lear and the recipe for Baked Alaska, but had no recollection of the word whatsoever.) But I was talking about King Canute. The story, is, of course, that he was so arrogant and despotic a leader that he believed he could control everything - even the tide. We see him on the beach, surrounded by subjects, sceptre in hand, ordering back the heedless waves; a laughing stock, in short. But what if we've got it all wrong? What if, in fact, he was so good and great a king that his people began to elevate him to the status of a god, and began to believe that he was capable of anything? In order to prove to them that he was a mere mortal, he took them down to the beach and ordered back the waves, which of course kept on rolling up the beach. How awful it would be if we had got it so wrong, if we had misunderstood his actions for so long.
Maybe it would be a good thing if I don't come back. But if I don't, I'll never get to find out anything, ask anyone any questions. But, then, do I really want to know?
     
'Would you mind holding the line a moment, please?' Susannah pushed the hold button on the phone. 'Alice, it's some bloody journalist. Can you talk to him? I've got a thousand things to do today and it's the last thing I need.'
     
Alice, on top of an aluminium step-ladder with an armful of books, shoved the books haphazardly on to a shelf. The Literature Trust was having a big crisis: not only were they in the process of moving from a cold, outsized, crumbling Georgian house in Pimlico to a compact terraced building in Covent Garden, but they heard yesterday that their main funding body was cutting their grant and sacking their director. A new director had already been appointed and would start tomorrow. Alice and Susannah, while still trying to absorb the news, were unpacking all the boxes from Pimlico.
'Oh, no,' Alice groaned, 'the vultures are circling already. What does he want? Did he say?' She wiped the palms of her hands on the overall she was wearing, leaving thick stripes of dust snaking up her legs.
'No. He asked for the press office.'
'The press office?' Alice repeated. 'Who does he think we are? Can you find out what it's about? Maybe I could call him back.'
Susannah returned to the line. 'Sorry to have kept you
waiting. Our press office is a bit tied up at the moment . . . She's up a ladder . . . Yes . . . Can I ask what it's regarding?' Susannah grimaced at Alice as the voice on the other end rattled on tinnily, like a trapped bee. 'OK. Fine. Hold on, please.' She put the phone on hold again. 'Alice, it's John somebody or other, the arts correspondent for . . .' Susannah named a national broadsheet. 'He says he wants to do a profile on us - the new-look Literature Trust. Why we've moved, what our plans are now, blah, blah, blah.'
'Yeah, right,' said Alice, as she climbed backwards down
the rickety steps of the step-ladder, 'I'll bet you my body weight in chocolate he's just digging dirt.'
     
I'd been working at the Literature Trust for two months and
     
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I loved it. Which was lucky because nothing much else was going right. I was living in the top flat of a