Read Genie and Paul for Free Online Page B

want to know about Paul, she said.
    Yes, said Genie. Tell me. 

(vii) Eloise’s Story
    I saw him about a week ago. He was in a bad way. Maybe that’s how he always was. Maybe I was always in such a bad way myself, I never saw it. So let’s say he was fine. As fine as he ever was. He wanted money. I went to see him at his hotel and gave it to him. I don’t know what he wanted it for. I had a few ideas. But I didn’t want to know. I didn’t want to know about him . How he’d been. He told me anyway. He told me about you. What he’d done to you. He was shaking and crying when he told me. I gave him the money on condition he didn’t contact me again. Look at me. I have a new life now. Do you know why I broke it off, in the end? Why, until last week, I’d not seen him in over a year? Let me tell you. We were living back near Old Street, just like in the early days. We never saw you. That was only a few months after Paul had found out about Sol. He wasn’t speaking to either of you. It was a strange building, right on City Road but somehow invisible from the street. You walked through an iron door into a narrow overgrown garden and this tall, sooted, spindly building. I don’t know what it was originally built for. A grain warehouse or something. There were six floors the size of hangars, several huge rooms on each. Paul and I had a floor to ourselves. Our room overlooked the road but you couldn’t hear a thing. It did my head in. Everything about it did my head in. That space. I felt like I was drowning in it. A guy on the floor above us had two pitbulls that would race each other up and down the corridor and around the empty rooms. This constant thundering andthumping. They’re densely built dogs. They don’t corner easily. And their nails! Shredding my nerves. I spent a lot of time in that room alone. A huge room with bare floorboards and everything we owned dumped in one corner like stuff that someone else had left behind. And me, on our mattress, in the other. Paul was out a lot, dealing or partying or both. I just sat indoors on my own, listening to those fucking dogs, getting iller and iller. It takes energy – courage – to live, and I had none. So I just lay there, really. How did it come to that? This past year I’ve been wondering. I was a kid when I met your brother. We were so free! Constantly on the move. Paul said something once. Wondering what it did to your mind, your sense of imagination to only ever live in the same type of space. Even a big wedding cake house like yours, he said, if it’s all you’ll ever know. It’s gotta do something to your sense of scale. Perspective. But we lived in warehouses, in big old Victorian pubs, council flats, in semis, disused factories… even a boat. It worked the other way for us. We got lost in all that space. And left something behind every time we moved. People, sometimes. Like Sol. By the time we got to City Road, there was very little left and I couldn’t think about changing things. And then something happened… Sometimes Paul brought people back. People I didn’t like. I didn’t like them for all kinds of reasons and you can guess what they were. But this one guy, Digs, he scared me. And, at the time, I was so listless that I really didn’t scare easily. He had these steeply sloped shoulders. They were so sloped his neck practically ran straight into his chest. Paul said he looked like an over-sharpened pencil. There was something about his eyes, too. They were like how an ice lolly goes when you’ve sucked all the colour out of it. They’d been out all night. They came into the room around midday. I was sitting there reading a magazine. Paul’s all excited, tells me he’s going to Digs’s place, Digs wants to show him somethingand did I want to come too? He didn’t live far, just in a block in Hoxton. I didn’t want to go. But I got this funny vibe. I suddenly felt I needed to be there, that my being there would keep Paul safe. A lot of