Free Going Grey by Karen Traviss Page A

ranch, but she was in her sixties and her health wouldn't hold out forever. He had to be ready to take care of her. He couldn't think beyond that to a time when he'd be completely on his own.
    How will I cope?
    Ian felt like two separate creatures, a grown man who was old enough to vote and had girls on his mind most of the time, and a useless, scared little boy who didn't know the first thing about dealing with the wider world. He had to shape up. He wasn't too crazy to shoulder responsibility.
    But I don't even have a driver's licence.
    Gran went on counting. "We'll have to talk about this and plan for the future," she said, not looking up. "I need to make sure you won't need to worry about money or a roof over your head."
    It didn't sound like she meant right now, but at least that opened the door enough for him to feel okay about mentioning it the next time. He took some of the rolls of banknotes and placed them around the ranch — the pantry, the gun locker, the grab bag in the hall, the steel tool cabinet in the barn — and then went to weed and water the vegetable patch at the back. If he kept busy, he wouldn't waste time worrying about things he couldn't even imagine. He needed his routine. It helped him pretend he had things under control.
    When he scrubbed up afterwards, he steeled himself to use the mirror that was usually folded out of sight. He ran the clippers through his hair and tried to remember if it was still the same dark brown that it had been three months ago, which might have been the real colour or just his imagination. He had no way of knowing. He kept staring, waiting for the inevitable distortion to kick in, but nothing happened. Even the hair on his forearms stayed the same. He felt quite pleased with himself for braving the reflection.
    People learn to cope with mental problems. OCD. Panic attacks. I've seen it on TV. Maybe I'm getting this under control.
    But what if it's neurological? Something wired wrong in my brain, like face-blindness. There's nothing I can do to cure that.
    Gran had a doctor friend who came to see them every few years, a guy about her age called Charles Kinnery. He'd always check Ian over as a favour, because Gran didn't trust physicians or dentists either. Yeah, I can ask Kinnery. When's he coming again? Ian had never had the nerve to ask the guy before, in case Gran hadn't mentioned that he was crazy. Maybe it was time.
    He shook the hair from the clippers into the toilet bowl, flushed it, and folded the mirror back against the wall. It hadn't felt quite so bad this time. Perhaps he'd been doing this all wrong. Maybe he could teach himself to accept what was really there just by forcing himself to look every day rather than avoiding it. Willing it to stop hadn't worked at all.
    When he finished the chores, he settled down to watch TV, his only glimpse of a world he'd probably never be part of. It was also his sole guide to how to behave around the kind of people he'd never met, like girls, police, bullies, and bartenders. Wasn't that how normal people learned to fit in as kids, though, by watching others? Ian rehearsed his lines, mimicking the actor as he offered to buy a woman a drink, right down to matching his accent.
    Normal people probably didn't notice that kind of detail. Ian knew he had to soak it up, every bit of it, every pause, every rise in pitch, every mannerism, because he hadn't spent years absorbing it gradually by mixing with others.
    "What are you having?" He tried out the words. Maybe everybody needed a script in real life. "What are you having? So what can I get you?"
    Well, that was how impersonators did it. He'd seen a comedian interviewed about how he got his impressions right by watching videos of celebrities for hours on end, dissecting every blink and syllable. As far as Ian was concerned, there was no difference between working out how to talk like the President and learning how act and sound like a regular guy.
    Perhaps he could play the role