Read Lasting Damage for Free Online Page B

reason.’
    ‘You want me to describe the lounge?’ I feel as if I’m at a kids’ party, playing a stupid game.
    ‘Please.’
    ‘White walls, beige carpet. A fireplace at the centre of one wall, tiles around it. I couldn’t see the tiles in detail, but I think they had some kind of flower pattern on them. They were too old-fashioned for the room.’ I realise this only as I hear myself say it, and feel relieved. Kit might choose tiles like that for our house, which was built in 1750, but never for a modern house like 11 Bentley Grove that can’t be more than ten years old. He believes new buildings should be wholeheartedly contemporary, inside and out.
    Therefore 11 Bentley Grove is nothing to do with him.
    ‘Go on,’ says Sam K.
    ‘Alcoves on either side of the chimney breast. A silver L-shaped sofa with red embroidery on it, a chair with funny wooden arms, a coffee table with a glass top and flowers in a sort of horizontal display case under the glass – blue and red flowers.’ To match the tiles . There was something else, something I can’t call to mind. What was it? What else did I see, while the room was slowly circling? ‘Oh, and a map above the fireplace – a framed map.’ That wasn’t it, but I might as well mention it. What else? Should I tell Sam K there was something else but I don’t know what? Is there any point?
    ‘A map of?’ he asks.
    ‘I couldn’t see – it was too small in the picture. In the top left-hand corner there were some shields – about ten maybe.’
    ‘Shields?’
    ‘Like upside-down gravestones.’
    ‘You mean crests?’ says Kit. ‘Like when a family has a crest?’
    ‘Yes.’ That’s it. I couldn’t think of the word. ‘Most of them were colourful and patterned, but one was empty – just an outline.’
    Was the empty crest the missing detail? I could pretend it was, but I’d be kidding myself. My mind took something else from that room, something it won’t put back.
    ‘Anything else?’
    ‘A dead woman in a pool of blood,’ I say, hating the belligerence in my voice. Why am I so angry? Because you’re powerless , Alice would say. We manufacture anger to give ourselves the illusion of power when we feel weak and helpless .
    At last, I hear the words I’ve been waiting for. ‘Describe the woman,’ Sam K says.
     
     
    Words begin to pour out of me, an uncontrollable flow. ‘When I saw her, and all that blood, when I realised what I was looking at, I looked down at myself – that was the first thing I did. I panicked. For a second I thought I was looking at a picture of myself – I looked down to check I wasn’t bleeding. I didn’t understand it afterwards – why would I do that? She was lying on her front – I couldn’t see her face. She was small, petite, my size and build. She had dark hair, same colour as mine, straight like mine. It was . . . messy, sort of fanned out, as if she’d fallen and . . .’ I shudder, hoping I don’t need to spell it out: dead women can’t make adjustments to their hair.
    ‘I couldn’t see her face, and I imagined – just for a second, until I got my bearings – that she was me, that I was the one lying there. Stop writing,’ I hear myself say. Too loud . ‘Can’t you just listen, and make notes afterwards?’
    Sam K puts down his notebook and pen.
    ‘I don’t want to build it up into more than it was,’ I say. ‘I knew she wasn’t me, of course I did, but . . . it was as if my perception played a trick on me. It must have been the shock. She was lying in the most blood I’ve ever seen. It was like a big red rug under her. At first I thought it couldn’t be blood because there was so much of it, it covered about a third of the room, but then I thought . . . Well, you must know. You must have seen dead people lying in their own blood, people who’ve bled to death.’
    ‘Jesus, Con,’ Kit mutters.
    I ignore him. ‘How much blood is there, normally?’
    Sam K clears his throat. ‘What you’re