Free Starlight Peninsula by Charlotte Grimshaw Page A

sleep it off.
    But her back door was standing open.
    Ahead of her was the boxed air of the hallway, with its bright, forensic stillness; behind her the peninsula was alive. The wind rustled the flax spears, clouds crossed the moon, striping the grass and casting patches of blackness that could be shadows or the holes opening in her vision. Moonlight on the mangroves, on the tidal basin, a big patch of sky near the moon that was clear and full of stars. She faced the hallway again and the stars had lodged in her eyes, their silver glare obscuring something dark that moved beyond the brightness.
    Had someone crossed the doorway at the end of the hall?
    Her phone was lying on the small table inside. She listened, then ran into the hall, grabbing for the phone and sending it flying off the table. She scrabbled for it on the floor and seemed only to be chasing it with the clumsy tips of her fingers. There was a sound somewhere in the house, and she went still, crouched on the floor. Her fingers closed around the phone. She straightened up and walked to the door, pulling it closed it behind her. Then she was away up the path, not looking behind.
    From the pub at the top of the peninsula, she rang her sister.
     
    She lay in Carina’s spare room in a bed that smelled of dog, with a flannel over her eyes. Scattered on the table beside her was a collection of pills mined from Carina’s bathroom cupboard. At intervals she would moan, and reach blindly up, and shakily crack the seal on another foil tray. Pain made tiny, evil seams of light that pulsed in her brain. Pain was a network of lines in the darkness, as fine and bright as a spider’s web.

SEVEN
    Dr Klaudia Dvorak’s office was the back room of an elegant old Herne Bay shop, its French doors open to the garden. A grey-haired woman gardener tended the flowerbeds on the lawn outside.
    Eloise listened.
    ‘I have always had a special interest in violence,’ Klaudia was saying.
    The Nazis, Eloise thought.
    ‘This started because of the war, the role of previous generations of my family in …’
    Genocide, thought Eloise dreamily, watching the old woman cross the lawn, knocking earth out of a plant pot with a trowel. The tapping of the trowel against the clay pot, the drone of a car in the distance.
    ‘I was thinking more of my mother,’ Eloise said.
    Klaudia smiled. ‘Ah. Your mother, yes. She worked in your father’s business, you said, now retired?’
    Eloise leaned forward. ‘That’s right. My father is an architect. My mother was his assistant. She didn’t go to university actually, but she reads a lot. By war, I meant domestic warfare. All the aggression under the surface. Isn’t life hard enough without it? It’s all so …’
    ‘So …?’
    ‘It’s all so unnecessary .’
    ‘We humans are not famous for being rational,’ Klaudia said.
    ‘The things she comes out with, bearing in mind my husband’s just had an affair and left me: “The poor mayor, his life’s so stressful he needed to have an affair just to get through the day.” It implies men are justified in having affairs, which implies Sean’s affair was justified. Maybe I wasn’t giving Sean enough. It fits with her new line that she accepted our father’s affairs, because she was a “realist”, when the truth is she was furious about his affairs. She attacks and plays the submissive wife in one breath.’
    ‘Very subtle.’
    ‘What we’re all supposed to know about her is that she’s not subtle, she’s an open book. An honest Mancunian. She’s unable to tell a lie. She’s so simple and innocent, she just comes out with things, inadvertently. It’s always, Ooh, what did I do? Did I say something wrong? I’m an open book, me.’
    ‘Hmm. It’s called plausible deniability.’
    ‘She’s so “honest” she “can’t stop herself” telling my niece about my sister’s wild youth, even though my sister’s asked her not to. My sister’s paranoid her daughter will get into