Free Loss of Separation by Conrad Williams Page A

were padded to prevent chafing. Before closing the door on her, he had adjusted an electric fire so as to keep her warm, and switched on a radio. She had tensed herself to every sound over the following hours, convinced he would return to rape her or shoot her or torture her.
     
    Slow down. Breathe. Try to calm your heart. It is not good for you. You want to end up like your mother? A heart attack at 45? Then relax. Always worrying, she was. Always wringing her hands over some imagined problem or another. Heavy smoker. Drank too much. It's only wine. Wine is good for you. A glass to toast a sunny day. A glass to compensate for a cloudy one. Half a bottle with dinner. Half a bottle without. She slept badly, if at all. Do you want to be like her? Focus. Concentrate. Shift your mind.
     
    Miss Regan, then, with her long legs and her deep frown. She seemed so confident, yet she could never look a person in the face. Always at a point just above, the forehead, as if she were conversing with the third eye, the ajna ... and being a yoga teacher, perhaps she was. In her bedroom in the pub, with the other women. Not much room. A select bunch were we.
     
    Are they missing me? She wasn't meant for us. Too aloof. Too... foreign. There was a waiting list for that class. Someone would have sharked in, as Paul used to say. One out, one in. Where did she go? She wasn't around for long. That might have been the extent of it.
     
    Her mind turned to Paul, trying not to imagine him as she had last seen him, scabbed over and spent in his bed, but dynamic, as he had always seemed to her. He was the kind of person who constantly looked as though they were being propelled, that movement was a prerequisite of life, like that of a shark. But it wasn't the kind of energy that made you feel nervous, or exhausted. It inspired you. Even when he was relaxing, there was power in him, and purpose. When he slept, she imagined lifting his eyelids to see a 'standby' icon glimmering soft red where his pupils ought to be.
     
    There was a fraction of her, the most infinitesimal part (awful, unforgivable, disgusting), that found a shred of relief in what had happened to her. It meant she was spared having to watch her boyfriend (and God, wasn't that the weakest way to describe him... no, he was her man, her love, the love) curl up like a piece of paper introduced to flame. And if he was in hell, then she was with him now.
     
    She'd read somewhere once, about a mathematician, about how he would find himself some space and time to think, a window of fifteen minutes. The most he could devote to a problem was two or three minutes before his mind wandered. But this was exceptional, apparently. Most people spent less than that. Maybe only a minute or so, before something else impinged. It might feel as though you were dedicated to a task, but only generally. The ordinary mind couldn't cope with that kind of focus.
     
    She tried staying with Paul, but other things snapped their fingers, waved their hands in her face.
     
    That curtain, for example.
     
    It was a shower curtain. Like a shower curtain. White. Or it had been, once. Now it was grey, stained, mottled at its lower edges with mould. It was opaque, but not to the extent that you could not discern that something lay behind it. It was suspended by rusting rings from a rail attached to this low ceiling. So low that the bottom of the curtain was pleated up against the floor. It's bottom hem was filthy, dark with water sucked up by capillary action. It was the only other thing in the room, beyond that pitted lightbulb, to look at. It was so still that she sometimes formed the illusion that it was shivering, pulsing infinitesimally, as if it were touching something that bore a heartbeat and was waiting for her to sleep, or die, so that it could have its way with her.
     
    Not once, in all the days I've been here, has The Man pulled that curtain back. I don't know what's behind it. A bath? But he's only ever washed