Letters to the Lost Read Online Free PDF Page B

an animal hibernating, so that chunks of time were simply swallowed up by oblivion.
    When she was awake, the silence boomed and echoed in her head and she felt her voice shrivel and harden in her throat, like the Little Mermaid’s. It made her realize how much she wanted – needed – to sing; how, in spite of Dodge and her soured dreams, it was still part of who she was. Slipping soundlessly through the shadowy house she felt like she’d ceased to exist. Like a ghost.
    The world shrank to fit within the damp walls and the narrow slice of street visible through the gap in the curtains. Because the lane in front of the house was a dead end, traffic along it was limited and she became familiar with the regular passers-by. The house next door belonged to a young woman in her twenties, with either a job or a boyfriend that took her away from home overnight sometimes. She watched her leaving early in the morning, her heels clicking hurriedly up the front path, her ponytail swishing silkily, and envied her efficiency, her purpose, her cleanliness.
    The house at the other end of the row was lived in by two middle-aged men, who left together in the morning, bundled up in bright, knitted scarves, and returned separately at night, one of them weighed down with bulging carrier bags from a posh supermarket. She hadn’t seen the resident of the remaining house, but guessed it was an old person. Cars pulled up outside it three times a day, from which blue-uniformed women emerged. Carers, she assumed. Their visits were timed to coincide with mealtimes, and reminded her of her own hunger.
    The meagre stash of supplies in the kitchen cupboard had dwindled to almost nothing. She had finished the fig rolls, as well as a tin of rice pudding, one of peaches and a box of soft, stale Ritz crackers. All that remained was another tin of peaches and a jar of meat paste. Just looking at it made her feel ill; she would only resort to eating that in the direst emergency.
    The hunger was worse than the darkness or the cold because it didn’t just affect her body but her mind too. When she wasn’t asleep she found it increasingly hard to find the energy to move from the sofa, where she huddled beneath the blanket and gazed glassily out of the window as her thoughts scrolled, never finding focus. For months – since the night when Dodge had hurt her properly, frighteningly, for the first time – she had thought of nothing else but getting away from him. Most of the time it had felt like a hopeless ambition, but now she had achieved it she was like someone who had quite literally emerged from a dark tunnel into dazzling light. She had escaped, but couldn’t see where to go next.
    In the end it was the immediate need to eat that forced her to act. During her three days (was it three? . . . she’d lost track) on the sofa the pain in her ankle had eased until she was able to put weight on it and walk. She had the money in her jacket pocket . . . But she also had filthy hair, no shoes and the kind of dress that was likely to result in hypothermia and unfortunate assumptions. Wearily she mustered her remaining energy and applied it to the task of overcoming these obstacles.
    She started with the hair.
    There were scissors in the drawer in the kitchen; big ones, with long, rusty blades. Standing in the bathroom, she tipped her head upside down and, gathering her hair into a ponytail, attempted to cut it off. The blunt jaws of the scissors gnawed on it, like a dog chewing on a piece of tough meat, but eventually a heap of dark, lank hair lay at her feet. There was no shampoo, so she put her head under the tap, gritting her teeth as her scalp constricted beneath the icy water.
    Afterwards she felt lightheaded from the cold, the inversion of gravity and the absence of her long, heavy hair. She rubbed her head vigorously with the scratchy towel, then stood in front of the mirrored cabinet to examine the results of her handiwork.
    Oh God, she looked like a