Hello Darkness Read Online Free PDF Page A

cheeks, and that seemed to release a heck of a lot of emotion, as if the causal chain between feeling and physical effect had been reversed. We were laughing – laughing
at
each other, laughing
for
each other – with the tears falling off our faces and splashing onto the work surface. And I saw something that gave me hope, and with hope, courage. I saw her teeth. Before that day I’d only ever seen that closed-mouth smile of hers, the one she’d blown my way on the first day of school. But now the lips opened, and there they were. White, of course. White and small and lovely. But one tooth – at the front on the left, in between the incisor and the canine – crossed over another. Crossed over it by the merest millimetre, but crossed just the same. She was
not
perfect. She was something beyond perfect, because utter perfection engenders within itself the flaw of unattainability.
    “You drink coffee?” I asked, wiping the wet off my cheek.
    She gave the tiniest little shake of her head, and suddenly her face was serious. There was a pause of maybe a second into which you could have fitted a couple of full-length operas, right down to the fat lady singing. Then the smile again – the one without the teeth.
    “Tea.”
    I saw Ling Mei now, sitting with the other kids in Chinatown. They were eating noodles with chopsticks out of cardboard cartons, except for Ling Mei, who was using a plastic canteen fork. The moment I saw her, that bird came back to life in my chest, as I knew it would, flapping and squawking, like there was a fox in there chasing it. But today I wasn’t here to moon around, yearning and dreaming. This wasn’t one of the rainy nights I spent leaning against the lamppost outside her house, with my collar up and my hat brim down, hoping to prove my worth by sheer bloody perseverance, until her dad would come out with their Jack Russell terrier snarling at the end of its rope, and tell me to clear off before he called the police.
    No, today I was here to find out why Ling Mei’s chopsticks had hit the bin just after the stick insects had fallen like dry hail on the tiles of the toilet floor.
    She turned just before I reached her. The smile flickered, then died, and she bent back to her noodles.
    “Hey, Ling Mei.”
    I was too close to ignore.
    “Hi,” she said, as if I were a complete stranger.
    I sensed the collective hostility of the group. Four guys and two other girls. I knew a couple of them by name. One I knew
too
well. Jimmy Tan had gone out with Ling Mei after me. He hated my guts. His guts I could take or leave.
    “Not seen you use a fork before,” I said.
    “You think I don’t know how?”
    “I think you can do anything you set your mind to.”
    “So why do you care how I eat?”
    Ling Mei sounded bitter. She sounded hurt. And I couldn’t blame her, not after what I’d done. I put my hand on her shoulder.
    “Look, Ling, I’m sorry—”
    “This mental case bothering you, Ling Mei?”
    That was Jimmy Tan.
    “Butt out, Bruce,” I said, without looking at him.
    “It’s OK, Jimmy,” said Ling Mei. “I can handle this.” Then she looked at me again, her face like an angel with bad news. “Just tell me what you want, John. Then go, please. Just go.”
    I took the chopsticks out of my pocket.
    “I found these.”
    Her eyes opened wide, but she didn’t say anything.
    “You hear about the stick insects?”
    I guessed that word had gotten round. It’s what word did, at our school.
    She nodded, and a tiny cloud passed over her face.
    “I was there when it happened. In one of the cubicles.” Suddenly I wasn’t happy with the picture that might have formed in her beautiful head. “I mean just sitting out maths, like you do.”
    “I don’t,” she said.
    “Yeah, well, we can’t all be geniuses. Anyway, I heard someone dump the bodies. Then whoever did it threw these in the bin. That’s where I found them.”
    I handed the chopsticks to her.
    She looked at them for a moment,