Free The Lightning Cage by Alan Wall Page A

began to think, towards me, as though to say, ‘What on earth do you think you’re about here? There must be the better part of fifteen years between you, and you have nothing in common, apart from the one obvious thing. The girl not only doesn’t know how to dress; she’s barely capable of coherent speech. Can sex really be so important, Chris?’
    After dinner we wandered about, sipping coffee. Andrew decided to show off the Cavendish-Porter collection of paintings, what with Alice being in that line of business. He seemed particularly interested in her view of the hunting scenes.
    â€˜A wedding present, actually. What do you think of them?’ Andrew was well oiled by now, and affable again.
    Alice looked at them only for a matter of seconds and said, ‘I think they’re quite disgusting.’
    â€˜Disgusting?’ Andrew echoed, evidently taken aback.
    â€˜They’re all so formulaic,’ Alice said, ‘and the formula is only there to remind everyone what a lovely time you can have tearing other creatures to pieces.’ Andrew stared at her, as though for the first time fully taking her in, as he considered the implications of this, which was by far her longest statement of the evening.
    â€˜Oh God, you’re not one of those are you? Never heard such bloody nonsense in my life, frankly. Helena spent most of her childhood on top of a horse, didn’t you, darling?’ He shouted this last phrase through the open door, but Helena had started to wash up. Noisily. With each clanging lid and clattering plate I felt I heard an instruction to be gone.
    That night, for the first time since she had moved in, Alice and I did not make love.
    â€˜You’re full of meat,’ she said. ‘There’s an animals’ graveyard inside you.’
    I lay there and reflected on the evening. Alice had already started snoring, very gently. It struck me that I had never before seen Andrew and Helena bonding; they had even started confirming one another’s opinions, nodding at one another’s pronouncements. Alice had managed to bring them together in a surge of shared hostility.
    I pulled the sheets gently from her so that I could stare at her small boyish body, and I marvelled to see how dark the hair between her legs appeared in the gloom. I looked again at the hair on her head, but it was entirely white, and every single straggle of it seemed a different length from all the others. How could that be? Then I lay and listened to the sound of her, the little unexpected mountains that breached the mist of her breathing. It was warm in the room and I didn’t cover her again. I kept looking her up and down, from the charcoal furrow between her legs to the firm, small pointings of her breasts. Then at last my head sank back on to the pillow, and we lay there, the two of us, like a couple of Spartan soldiers sprawled on the hillside together after battle.

His Sudden Fits
    I’m sipping at a distillation of the crystal-fountain, an alchemical pot-full glows translucent in its clarity here on the table, and its bright and esoteric metal has begun once again to illuminate my veins. Gin: ardent spirit of Geneva, the stringent logic of the heart, the machinery that snares a creature used to soaring.
    RICHARD PELHAM , Letters
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    Jacob did not at first know what to make of it, but his lordship had been most specific in demanding of him that whatever Pelham required should be provided. So he found a small table and chair and moved them down to the cellar, as the poet had requested, and Pelham started to pass his days between Chilford’s study and the white hexagonal room underground, where he would take the books he had chosen, while helping himself to liberal potions from the casks. And he covered sheet after sheet of paper with his scribbles. Some days he did nothing else. Once, while the poet slept in an untidy heap, Jacob had picked one up and started to