by Dawn French
What unlovely wretches they prove themselves to be, abandoning all vestiges of class and style, allowing the vulgarity of their lower-middle-class shackles to triumph. How very very very disappointed I am in both of them. It is so extremely tiresome. I am exhausted from the disappointment. I must needs take to my bed. The confines of my room offer the succour and solitude I sorely need. Increasingly, I discover that the delights of the Nintendo III Dance Mat Challenge are my only worthy companion. There, at least, the red fires of my passion are sated. Farewell, dear diary, ’til anon.
AN EXTRACT FROM
ONE
Ed
Wednesday 10am
He sits with a sense of being watched, although he himself is the watcher. Momentarily, the others have stepped outside so he is suddenly, shockingly, alone with her. It’s odd for there to be no voices. No sound, save those of two human beings just being alive. He becomes acutely aware that for the first time in a very long time, he feels irrefutably more alive than her. She’s always making sure you know she’s chock-full o’ life. She lives big and loud. Right to her fingertips. Her presently somewhat swollen fingertips. Look at them. Someone, perhaps a nurse, has tried to remove the coral-red varnish, but it is stubborn and has bled into her skin, revealing the nails beneath to be unbeautiful, nicotiney. Blotchy red fingers. Yellow nails.
She wouldn’t like him to see such a personal thing, so he tries to stop looking … but of course he can’t. He is transfixed by the unusual sighting. He feels her watching, and although she isn’t and although he so wants to remain defiant, he looks away.
So. Here they both are again. Alone. They haven’t been alone in a room for … well, since they were married. What’s that? About … God … What is it now? Five years? Something like that.
There she is. Breathing.
Here he is. Breathing.
That’s it.
Pretty much like it was at the end of the marriage, really. Two people occupying the same air. Nothing else in common. Just oxygen. He remembers when sharing breath with her was exciting, intimate. He would lie close to her in the night, happily breathing in what she breathed out. The breath of life, their joint breath from their joint life.
This breathing now, though, is very different.
He hears his own. It’s quick and halting. It fits with his heartbeat, which is anxiously fast and occasionally missing altogether, when he finds himself holding his breath whilst urgent frightening thoughts distract him.
Her breathing is entirely unfamiliar. It’s regimented and deep. Her lungs are rhythmically resonating loudly around the room, chiming in with the bellow-like wheezing of the machine. She’s being breathed for, through a huge ugly tube in her throat.
Because Silvia Shute, despite all the supposed life in her, is in a coma.
THE BEGINNING
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MICHAEL JOSEPH
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First published 2015
Copyright © Dawn French, 2015
The moral right of the author has been asserted
‘Sexual Healing’ Words and Music by Marvin Gaye, Odell Brown and David Ritz © 1982, reproduced by permission of EMI Blackwood Music / EMI Music Publishing UK Ltd, London W1F 9LD
‘Happy’ Words and Music by Pharrell Williams © 2013, reproduced by permission of More Water From Nazareth/ EMI April Music, London W1F 9LD
‘I sat in the Sun’ copyright © Jane Hirshfield
‘Heigh-Ho’ Words by Larry Morey. Music by Frank Churchill. Copyright © 1938 Bourne
Every effort has been made to trace copyright holders.
The publishers will be glad to rectify in future editions any errors or omissions brought to their attention.
ISBN: 978-1-405-92154-1