Kind of Cruel Read Online Free PDF Page B

flank of lamp-posts along every rural A-road, so that pensioners and teenage girls can see the muggers and rapists lying in wait for them.
    There are no criminals anywhere in sight, I’m happy to report. Only a crazy woman in search of a notebook.
    Everything will be fine as long as Red Lipstick Woman has remembered to lock her car; I will be prevented from doing something insane and illegal. What law would I be breaking, I wonder. Something to do with trespass, probably. It can’t be breaking and entering if I don’t break anything. Unlawful entry?
    I try the driver door. It opens. Immediately, I feel more unlawful than I have ever felt. My gasps of breath hang like foggy graffiti on the air: visible evidence that I am here, where I shouldn’t be.
    All I’ve done is open a car door. Is that so bad? I could still close it and walk away.
    And never find out if you saw the words you think you saw.
    What if they’re not there? Will I go back to believing they must have come from Ginny – that she asked me to repeat them and then, for some impossible-to-imagine reason, denied it?
    The notebook lies open on the passenger seat, next to the black gloves. My hands shake as I reach over and pick it up. I start to flick through the pages. There’s lots of writing in here, but I can only make out the odd word; the sky is too dark, nearly as black as the surrounding fields. There’s a light on in the car – it came on when I opened the door – but in order to benefit from it I’d have to . . .
    Don’t think about it. Just do it.
    My heart pounding, I sit in the driver’s seat, leaving the door open and my legs outside in the cold, so that only part of my body is doing something wrong. I open the notebook again. At first I can’t concentrate; my focus is on my out-of-control heartbeat, which feels as if it’s about to spring out of my mouth. Will I be found at five o’clock, dead from a heart attack in a stranger’s car? At least I’ve shaken off my post-hypnosis stupor, finally – nothing like a bit of law-breaking to detrancify the mind.
    There’s no such thing as a hypnotised feeling . That’s what Ginny said. I’m no expert, but I think she might be wrong.
    When I’m calm enough to concentrate, I see that the notebook is full of letters, if you can call something that isn’t addressed to anyone or signed from anyone a letter. Which you can’t, I don’t think. My guess is that these diatribes were not written for sending but to make the writer feel better. Each one is several pages long, angry, full of accusations. I start to read the first one, then stop after a couple of lines as a tremor of panic rolls through me.
    What the hell am I doing? I’m not here to immerse myself in a stranger’s bitterness – I need to find what I’m looking for and get out of here. Now that I’ve glimpsed the verbal wrath Red Lipstick woman unleashes on anyone who crosses her, I’m even less keen than I was to be caught rifling through her possessions.
    I flick through the pages quickly: diatribe, diatribe, diatribe, shopping list, diatribe . . . After a while I stop looking at the content. There is too much writing on these pages for any of them to be the page I’m looking for: one with only five words on it, surrounded by lots of space; a mostly blank page.
    I’m an idiot. These pages aren’t lined. Why wasn’t that the first thing I spotted when I opened the notebook? Why am I still sitting here? Can hypnotherapy cause permanent brain damage?
    I carry on flicking through, although I’m guessing the notebook is unlikely to develop lines at its halfway point.
    Give up.
    Just one more.
    I turn the page, barely see the words before I hear the click of a door opening. Oh, no, oh, God, this is not happening . Harbouring an overpowering desire for something not to happen feels the same as forbidding it to happen. The drawback is that it doesn’t work.
    I’m trapped in an elongated rectangle of light. The woman whose car