Free Loss of Separation by Conrad Williams Page B

me with a cloth and a bucket of warm water. If it's a toilet, then why won't he let me sit on it, instead of putting me in those nasty incontinence pants morning and night? What would you need to conceal in a shitty little room like this? It makes me want to scream. I feel this panic build up behind my lips and sometimes its too great for whatever it is to escape. I cry or make this weird sort of sobbing, strangled voice in my throat. What is that? Frustration? Fear? Panic? All of it, and more, probably. I've never made a noise like it before in my life. I'm finding out about myself in here. I'm coming to know me a little better. And I'm not sure I like who I am.
     
    She tried screaming, once. Early. Maybe as early as the first day, although her head was pounding with the dregs of whatever it was he'd bested her with. Chloroform? She remembered the hand and the handkerchief whipping around her face, and then a dream of monkeys linking arms, dancing around a campfire, and she was dancing too. And then waking up with her hands tenderly manacled, and the great, punishing dark, so black she was sure for a while that she was dead. She called out but nobody answered, nobody came. She screamed for help and her voice fell against the walls as if it were constructed from cotton wool.
     
    He came to her later, The Man, and switched on the light and she averted her gaze from the cold, orange plastic of his face, and read the note he pushed in front of her eyes.
     
    Scream all you want. Soundproof. Nobody will hear you.
     
    Why doesn't he speak to me?
     

Chapter Five
     
    CVR
     
    On the beach. Nacre sky. Endless stones damp and bright from the retreating surf. I empty the plain polythene bag of its contents and start building the pyre. Milk teeth in an envelope. A mass of clipped hair tied together with rubber bands. A photograph of a man sitting in front of a Mediterranean meal, his eyes scorched out of the paper. I finish him off. First match. The teeth don't burn. I toe them into the stones, hoping that the child that gave them up made a few quid from the tooth fairy. Hoping they fell out naturally. A sweetish smell rises from the burning hair, and it goes with a lilac flame. I see faces in the smoke. Half-recognised. Strangers.
    I never wanted children. Or rather, I thought I didn't. I believed I had no time for that, and when my career was over, or at a stage where I had more time, I would be too old to become a father. I thought, post-40, it was a bad idea to procreate. You'd be too tired to play with your offspring when they needed it. You'd be nothing but a mildly interesting fossil to your grandchildren.
    I never discussed children with Tamara. She never brought it up so I didn't feel the need. We used contraception when we first started seeing each other and this carried on out of habit. Tamara was very easy around children, and I could see her mothering instinct was coming to the fore. When I left my profession I thought it might be time to discuss family. But then the accident happened. Maybe she left me because she wanted to be a mother and believed that I wasn't interested. Maybe she thought I would be no use now as a father. What good is a dad who can't play football with his son, or swing his daughter around in the park?
    I trudged to the bookshop. Ruth was at work, but she'd agreed to let me play shopkeeper. She told me she'd buy me a present if I made more than five pounds in one day. I wasn't seeing her around as much as I hoped. I wanted to talk to her about the boat trip, and I was worried that she was spending too much time doing her job. I suspected it was a way of screening her thoughts from the baby because when her mind turned to the pregnancy she also dwelled upon the events that resulted in it.
    Vulcan trotted in after a few minutes and took up his position on the cushion in the window. He paused to look at me while he washed one of his paws, as if he couldn't quite believe someone else was being his