Girl in the Dark Read Online Free PDF

rows on outsize patent-leather feet.
    Back on the boat, we cruise around the other islands, but do not land. These are the private bailiwicks of birds, birds in their thousands, birds stacked on shelves of black rock, perched in jostling rows on top of low cliffs, bouncing across expanses of turf, shrieking, rasping, swooping, diving, living their intense unfathomable lives.
    I say to Pete, “I can see why people get obsessed by birds. They’re probably the wild creature that most people see most often, and in greatest profusion.”
    “Yes,” he replies. “Or at least in parts of the world where herds of wildebeest are less common. And there are lots of different sorts, so you get to check them off a list, which people really like.”
    “If I were a bird,” I say dreamily, “I think I’d be a gannet. I would get to do those amazing dives, from hundreds of feet in the air, head first into the sea. I remember watching them when I was small, on holiday on the Isle of Arran, with my mum and dad.”
    Pete laughs and puts his arm round me. “Head for heights, voracious appetite, likes fish,” he says. “Sounds appropriate.”
    “How rude,” I retort. “Anyway, how about you?”
    He looks into the distance, considering. “I think I’d be an owl,” he says judiciously, and suddenly I’m overwhelmed with love for him, as though those six shortwords have released some warm bright substance into my system, and it is surging through my veins.
    We huddle together on the hard narrow seats that line the deck of the boat. Three hours have passed since the start of the trip, and the sky is growing greyer. The small amount of colour that the islands possess drains away and the seascape becomes a study in monochrome. A chilly wind has sprung up and the boat plunges and soars as it noses its way through the swell. Leaving the last of the islands, it begins a wide arc towards home.
    The change in direction means a shift in our position relative to the wind. The current of air which has been blowing past me ceases, and I become aware of something that up to now I have failed to notice, or perhaps that I have been refusing to notice, have kept pushing back below the surface of consciousness like an inconveniently buoyant corpse.
    My face.
    My face.
    The tension that fell from me earlier in the day rears up from the deck of the boat. It binds itself round my body, tighter and fiercer than before.
    I have followed everyone’s advice. I am here in the wildness, in the emptiness, surrounded only by elemental things: sea and air and rock and sky. I have removed myself from the artificial environment of the office, fetid with the stench of deadlines and the plasticky fumes of computers. There are no fluorescent lights or screens. There is only—
    There is only the sun.
    The human body is an amazing thing. Parts of itgamely keep functioning, even as other parts reel. My hands grip the edges of the wooden bench and my heart zigzags inside my chest. My vision is blurring and I can hardly get air into my lungs. But my voice remains calm. I hear myself chatting to Pete about birds, and what we might do for dinner, and the shots he wants to take of Dunstanburgh Castle, and our rather ghastly room at the B&B, all dark MDF and glass ornaments with a view into a hedge and the base of a telegraph pole. I listen to our laughter as though from outside of myself, and am astonished at how normal I sound.
    I do not want to spoil this day, this lovely day of birds and sky. I want to keep it whole and pure so I can hold it in my mind, a talisman against whatever is to come.
    It is only in the evening, back in our weird B&B, that, my face on fire, I let go and howl. Pete holds me in his arms on the cramped double bed. “Oh God, this is the end,” I cry. “It’s got to be the sunlight. It can’t be anything else.”
    Neither of us knows what to do. We pass a sleepless night, rigid, side by side, a pair of waxworks under the slippery purple