Little Fingers! Read Online Free PDF

poured
sugared sand. You could see the ants burrowing away. Louise admired
their ceaseless energy.
    The last time
I saw her was when she had already slipped into a coma over the
weekend. I had been away, sleeping over with friends, and my mother
believed that it would be too distressing for me to be recalled to
join her at Louise's bedside. I remember thinking that it was odd
that the sleepover was lasting so many nights. My friend Rupert's
parents came up with some plausible excuse or another.
    The death bed
of a child is especially grim. It affects the hospital staff as
well as the family, as well as anyone who happens to be passing. It
is so against our desired order of things. We want to believe that
everything has its time and place, and that a child has no place
dying. We want to believe in meritocracy, such that all smokers,
and drinkers, and drug abusers, and child-batterers, and
wife-beaters, and rapists, and traffic wardens should go first. It
is not that way. The hospital beds of thousands of young children
tell you otherwise.
    “ Oh God, why
her?”
    I prayed for
special powers to save her.
     
    * *
*
     
     

Chapter
4
     
    Have you
thrown this book down yet, Inspector? You must be shouting “Get on
with it, Julia. Get on with it.” You must want to get to the heart
of things, and you are only getting to the heart of me. Maybe that
is some compensation. I am trying to get to the heart of me
too.
    I am taking my
time, I am afraid.
    I am giving
you a privileged insight into how my mind works because we have sat
so many times together, talking, that it is only fair that you
glimpse everything, and that you realise that I know everything -
your every thought.
    Maybe you are
getting hot under the collar. That flush that starts as a thumping
in the chest, and rises to a heat buzzing through your ears. Then
the cold feeling descends, and the terrible realisation dawns. She
knows everything?
    And when you
have read this, and we meet again, you will be attempting that
impossible task - not to think something that you are already
thinking about. “Do not think about pink elephants”, we used to
challenge each other, and laughed as we realised that we could not
subsequently banish pink elephants from our minds for the duration
of the task. “Do not think about my naked body as we talk,
Inspector.” One of us will be deeply uneasy throughout our
conversation. We will never be friends again, because you will be
unavoidably aware that I will have a detailed map of what you are
thinking as we talk, and that the playing field can never be level
between us.
    I get a map,
and pictures too. It is a three-D neural map, the sort of map you
see if you buy brainstorming software where you can link any
concept to any other concept. On my map, labels shimmer as they are
in a constant flux of re-evaluation. On one side of my brain I get
the live pictures, either in scanning mode (where the most
interesting mental pictures around me zap in and out of my
consciousness), or in personal mode (where I can lock in on every
visual and aural thought a specific individual has).
    I can also
scan groups, monitoring what each person is thinking of the other.
You can imagine that what you get is not what you see. I must have
spent most of those first few weeks with my mouth open, physically
reeling, occasionally laughing out loud.
    You may have
the impression by now that I am the sort of person you definitely
do not want to spend time with any more. I am too bizarre, too
scary. I am not at all the person you thought I was.
    That is the
question everyone asks, don't they? “Will they still love me when
they find out what I am really like? If the one I love had
unlimited and total access to every thought I have day and night,
what would they think of me? Would they forgive me?”
    Our first
reaction is that they would despise us. They would know about our
greed, our peevishness, our anger, our pettiness, our spitefulness,
our contempt, our desire