Damage Read Online Free PDF

writer. She lives happily with Wilbur on the West Coast of America. I haven’t seen her for two years. This causes me no pain, nor, I believe, does it distress her. We write occasionally. I phone at Christmas, Easter and birthdays. My father was a diplomat. I travelled a great deal as a child. I went to school in Sussex, spent my holidays anywhere and everywhere. I was not upset when my parents divorced. My father, though apparently distressed at the time of my mother’s affair with Wilbur, recovered sufficiently to marry a 35—year-old widow with two children. They have since produced a daughter, Amelia. I visit them occasionally in Devon.’
    ‘Were you an only child?’
    ‘No.’
    I waited.
    ‘I had a brother. Aston. He committed suicide by slashing his wrists and throat in the bathroom of our apartment in Rome. No chance of misinterpretation. It was not a cry for help. No one knew why at the time. I shall tell you. He suffered from an unrequited love of me. I tried to soothe him with my body …’ she paused, then continued in staccato, ‘his pain, my foolishness … our confusion … He killed himself. Understandably. That is my story, simply told. Please do not ask again. I have told you in order to issue a warning. I have been damaged. Damaged people are dangerous. They know they can survive.’
    For a long time we were silent.
    ‘Why did you say “understandably” Aston killed himself?’
    ‘Because I understand. I carry that knowledge within me. It is not a treasure that I jealously guard. Simply a story I did not wish to tell, about a boy you have never known.’
    ‘That makes you dangerous?’
    ‘All damaged people are dangerous. Survival makes them so.’
    ‘Why?’
    ‘Because they have no pity. They know that others can survive, as they did.’
    ‘But you have warned me.’
    ‘Yes.’
    ‘Was that not an act of pity?’
    ‘No. You have gone so far down the road that all warnings are now useless. I will feel better for having told you. Though the timing is wrong.’
    ‘And Martyn?’
    ‘Martyn does not need a warning.’
    ‘Why not?’
    ‘Because Martyn asks no questions. He is content with me. He allows me my secrets.’
    ‘And if he found out the truth?’
    ‘What truth?’
    ‘You and I.’
    ‘That truth. There are other truths.’
    ‘You seem to ascribe to Martyn qualities of self-sufficiency and maturity I have not noticed.’
    ‘No. You haven’t noticed.’
    ‘And if you are wrong about him?’
    ‘That would be a tragedy.’
    Of her body I have little to say. It was simply essential. I could not bear the absence of it. Pleasure was an incidental. I threw myself on her, as on to the earth. I forced all parts of her to feed my need and watched her grow larger and more powerful, the more she provided. Hungry, I would hold her at a distance by hair or breast, sick with anger that I could have what I wanted.
    And round every meeting with her spun a ribbon of certainty that my life had already ended. It had ended in the split second of my first sight of her.
    It was time out of life. Like an acid it ran through all the years behind me, burning and destroying.

T HIRTEEN
    I HAD OPENED A DOOR to a secret vault. Its treasures were immense. Its price would be terrible. I knew that all the defences I had built so carefully — wife, children, home, vocation — were ramparts built on sand. With no knowledge of any other path I had made my journey through the years, seeking and clinging to landmarks of normality.
    Did I always know of this secret room? Was my sin basically one of untruthfulness? Or, more likely, one of cowardice? But the liar knows the truth. The coward knows his fear and runs away.
    And if I had not met Anna? Ah, what providence for those who suffered such devastation at my hand!
    But I did meet Anna. And I had to, and I did open the door, and enter my own secret vault. I wanted my time on earth, now that I had heard the song that sings from head to toe; and known the