Loss of Separation Read Online Free PDF Page A

against the windscreen, his face spread into it, moments before it shattered outward. He realised that the popping sound must have been something in Gordon's legs giving way - his knees or his pelvis - to allow them to fly free of the footwell in the back. The popping noise disturbed him more than anything else; more than the visit to the morgue to identify the body. Carol turned to dust inside. She stopped speaking. She withdrew so far that she seemed for ever on the verge of turning around.
    We both drank our wine a little too quickly, talking about this awful accident. I motioned to Ruth's glass, and though she looked reluctant, she nodded her head.
    I reached for the bottle of wine and felt my spine crack. Grey mist drizzled across my vision. The bolus of mashed breadsticks in my mouth caked the back of my throat; I couldn't swallow it. Through the grain I saw the beak of the broken gull, bloodied and shuddering. I heard bubbles of air being sucked through wounds. The gull bent the spar of its wings and lifted from the sand; black, blood-wet clumps hung or fell from the chicane of its body.
    And then Ruth was doing something to my back and the pressure relented and I was able to swallow and colour came back to my world.
    'It's all right,' she said. 'It's okay. Just a spasm. A muscle spasm.'
    'Christ,' I said.
    'Not that I'm going to say "told you so", or anything like that.'
    I shook my head. 'That was more painful than being hit by the car.'
    'Just take it easy. There's plenty of time for you to up the ante. There's no rush.'
    She reached across me for her glass. Her face glided past my own, inches away. I smelled her, fresh and good and pregnant, and wondered where Tamara was, what she was doing. Was she thinking of me? Was she dissolving in her own acid guilt? I wondered if she would recognise me, should she turn up, racked with remorse. I couldn't bear to be rejected twice. It was better that she was lost to me.
    I went out again after dinner. I felt full and, somehow, braced against further injury, as if the swell of food in my belly was acting as a buffer against my spine. Ruth had gone to bed with a cup of raspberry leaf tea and one of her non-fiction books about the indomitable human spirit of survival. She was obsessed by the human capacity to endure. If we were reading together in the same room, she'd break into my concentration with some excerpt about life in extremis: seriously injured mountaineers who crawl thousands of feet to safety; the story of the Japanese man lost on a winter hill who broke his pelvis and went into hibernation.
    I made sure I shut the door quietly, not wanting another lecture on the fragility of my body and mind. I was coming back, I was healing, but so much of that was only going to happen if I regained control of myself. I felt, sometimes, like some piece of meat being tossed about by Ruth's tongs.
    The air was splinter cold. I thought I could smell woodsmoke on it, but I was always smelling smoke these days. I couldn't tell if it was real or some olfactory breakdown courtesy of the accident. I stood and looked at the cleaned-out sky, massive above the village. Stars everywhere. The longer you stared, the more made themselves known. They were there on cloud-packed days of storm. They were there when you fell in love with a woman you no longer knew. They were there for her now, wherever she was.
    I had never walked the beach at dead of night. It would be fun to do so, to see the colour and glow in those fishermen's tents, watch the loose particles on the surface snake across the packed sand like spindrift. But I was dog-tired. My back was seizing up; my legs felt as though they'd been dipped in quick-drying concrete. I thought of the beach further south, how it was collapsing into the sea, as it had done since the continents were formed. No amount of bulldozers and boulders were going to stop it. This entire bulge of East Anglia was sinking. In ten thousand years or so, the map of the