Loss of Separation Read Online Free PDF

UK would look as though a shark had bitten off its backside.
    Ruth in bed, warm with her books and her tea. She was my riprap. She was my water barrier. I wondered what was stalling the tide for her. Not me. I was too weak. But I might, in time. I wanted to. But I needed to find out what had happened to Tamara, first. I needed to hear her version of events. I felt itchy, cuckolded, left out of some crucial loop. I felt like what I was: someone who had lost six months of his life.
    Far off, above the lights of the oil tankers fastened to the horizon, the glitter and flash of aviation lights: a jet at cruising altitude chalking the night. If I stopped breathing, I could just hear its call.
    I went back inside, fast as I could. It was if the heat from the engines, no matter how many miles away, and counting, had scoured out the back of my throat. My bowels were suddenly loose as soup. Tragedy accreted. Layers of it pressing down, a geology of misery. If I'd thought the near miss would be subsumed by the hit-and-run, I was wrong. They held hands together and laughed; siblings reunited after too long apart.
    I had gripped the control stick so tightly, I left fingermarks in it.

Chapter Three
     
    The Pain Nurse
     
    Ruth was dressed for work by the time I had struggled out of my bed. With her nurse's uniform on, she seemed fussier, more driven. She bustled about the living room, collecting things for her bag. I sat in the stiff, upright armchair that nobody else used and sipped tea, watching her, getting tired out by her industry. She was ordering me in that mock serious way of hers to relax today. I was not, repeat not, allowed to walk on the beach. The most effort I was expected to expend was in raising my arm to pour medicine, or fix myself lunch, by which time she would be back to check on me.
    I gazed at her face and tried, again, to come to terms with what was happening here. Everything was new to me; it was not to her. She was clued up. I had been assimilated into her routine and was a part of her life now. I was three weeks into the biggest shock I'd ever experienced. Her face was at once the most familiar and the most foreign to me. I needed her, but I didn't know how much. At that obvious level, the nurse tending the healing, but I was beginning to feel something deeper, something uncoiling in me as it had when I first met Tamara. I was at a loss. I knew this sort of thing happened. Wounded soldiers were always falling in love with the angels who patted cold compresses against their fevered brows.
    I sat there sipping tepid Typhoo, huddled in my musty old bathrobe, feeling cheap and nasty and unfaithful.
    Ruth kissed my cheek, snatched up her keys and opened the door. A hesitation, a slight stiffening, then she was gone. I waited a minute or two, until I heard the struggling engine of her old Ford recede down Surt Road, and then hobbled to the door, thinking that even if I wanted to go to the beach I couldn't physically hack it.
    On the doorstep was another shoebox. Blue. This had held a children's pair of all-terrain boots. The words Snow Field were written on the top of it. Whoever owned these shoes had bought them in France, where their foot size was 26. 1er Prix, the box boasted: 12,90 € . I picked it up and brought it inside, smelling it first to check there was nothing on the turn. I had once been left a polythene bag of what looked like regurgitated chicken livers. A woman brought me ten garden refuse sacks filled with the soiled nappies of her six-week-old daughter. She had wanted to save everything, but it had overtaken her life, her home. People left me uneaten dinners congealing on paper plates. They left me dead pets.
    Today there was nothing like that. A bunch of letters, some formal-looking documents, unmarked CDs in booklet-free jewel cases, a birthday card, a toy elephant, a toy car.
    I felt a shiver as I thought of the person driving the car that had hit me. I wondered if he or she were local, whether