Read A Habit of Dying for Free Online

head. I have so many words swirling around they won’t stay still long enough to be written. So this is an exercise, think of it as a piano player warming up before a performance she said. Are there scales for this, should I copy out lines from a book like a schoolboy in detention? Maybe a word list of love and hate and death and destruction, sights and sounds and a word I read the other day, sepulchral, which has a very good form in the mouth when I speak it. Conjunction feeble effortless timeless wisdom anxious westerly brand noxious gases bullet poison envelope powder dimension bread rabbit.
    I will start again. I have to get some of this stuff out of my head and on to paper, maybe that way there will be some resolution, some means to an end whatever that may be. Writers tell of the cathartic effects of committing their thoughts to paper don’t they? It is a start, the first words are out there, the rest will surely gush. But the real start, where was that? Was it way back in the mists of my other life, my other times, or, more prosaically, at the clichéd first sight from the window onto the wet footpath beyond the steps up to the house? Yes, it was that moment that sealed the future and all it has brought.
    Her figure was trim but not exactly skinny. Short dark hair round a sharp face with a wide mouth. She struggled in the rain to unload her cardboard boxes from the little blue hatchback and lug them up the steps and into the house. Delivering for a friend perhaps, a new tenant? It did not matter, it would never matter, all that mattered was that that glance out the window, that fixed moment in time, had happened. The rest was decided, sealed, locked into the guidance system of life for eternity.
    SDI entered my life at that moment and has been right there ever since. She should not have been, she should never have been, but she is. For how much longer I cannot now say because there is an end to this by some means.
    Lydia did not know what to make of it. A novel? Notes for a novel? A diary, and if not, then what? Why the almost coded reference? Why not Shirley or Sheilagh? A shorthand perhaps, surely not a nickname. It was written by someone who was used to writing, to dealing with words and that person had a feeling, a passion even, for his subject. On balance, Lydia felt inclined to her notes-for-a-novel idea. She read on for a while until on the third or fourth page it became difficult to read and it seemed that someone else had taken over the writing. She put the book aside and gave what she had read a little more thought. It did not seem likely that it would contain anything of value, and yet she was attracted to it in a way that was hard to justify. Perhaps she would work through the rest of it. It had been written backwards, starting on the last page in the book, and that alone seemed a strange way to make notes for a novel, or to write anything else. In some places so much pressure had been applied that the writing was impressed into the page. Even on closer examination there were passages that she couldhardly make out at all. The writing became more and more illegible as it progressed, so to read it all she would need to become very familiar with the writer, the context, and feel for the words as much as read them. All that would take time, a lot of time. There were more pages than she’d first realised, perhaps thirty or forty. She did not like the thought of having two projects at the same time and for all she knew she had three or four already, all of which stubbornly refused to give up their secrets. So she did what she knew she would do, put the book away in its box and let the questions slip to the back of her mind until a resolution appeared.

    Even if the book should turn out to be a cuckoo in the nest of albums there was nothing to be lost by deciphering it. If in doing so some connection emerged then that would be a bonus. Besides which, the albums were hardly a full time occupation, Lydia had done