Lost for Words: A Novel Read Online Free PDF Page B

Sunday she and Stephen had to go and see Poppy in the clinic. Poppy was back inside after her weight dropped below thirty-five kilos. The slightest hint that her mother was in a hurry to get back to work would be treated by Poppy as further evidence of betrayal and neglect, of Vanessa’s preference for ideas over human relationships, of an academic ambition whose impossibly high standards were ultimately responsible for her illness. Poppy’s eating disorder had started during the term before her GCSEs. She later explained, or made up the explanation, that she felt she was not only competing with all the students in her year, but also with her donnish parents, who took her success for granted and only paid attention to her failures. Later, when she did her A-levels, she won a scholarship to Cambridge, where both her parents taught. On the other hand, she had to be admitted to hospital for the first time that year. In support of her argument, it was true that this crisis secured her far more parental attention and professions of love than she had ever been given before.
    As Vanessa’s mind approached the black hole of her daughter’s illness, it tended to veer off into generalizations: the paradox that the inflated exam grades designed to banish low self-esteem from the national psyche made anything less than ten A*s into a source of low self-esteem; the fact that the long backward look now taken by universities encouraged an emphasis on obedience and conformity that were not necessarily the best indicators of intellectual curiosity and incisiveness. She took refuge in the platitudes of her social circle, so much easier to contemplate than her children’s individual cases. Tom had returned from the ‘birthday party’ he had been to last weekend, admitting that it had in fact been an ayahuasca ceremony that ended when one of the participants went into a coma. With only eight weeks before his A-levels, Tom had spent three days at home recovering from the weekend’s psychedelic ordeal. Now that Poppy was back in the clinic, Vanessa had lost her nerve and instead of lecturing him, carried bowls of soup to his bedroom on a tray.
    Quite apart from this multitude of obligations, she was surrounded by the Elysian Prize submissions, piled up around her armchair. These required an immediate and decisive focus, not only to reclaim some floor space by clearing out the hopeless cases (she thought involuntarily of Poppy’s bed at the clinic being liberated by her death) but also to get down, over the next two weeks, to the final twenty books out of which the Long List of twelve would then be chosen. Her first task, which she intended to dispatch before the Brontë tutorials, was to take a look at one of Malcolm’s candidates, wot u starin at. She was inclined to stay on good terms with Malcolm and to keep her polemical powder dry for the later stages of the competition. Her intention was not to read the book through, unless it became a candidate for the Long List, but to let it through, if at all possible, to the last twenty.
    She started reading the first page.

    ‘Fuck! Fuck! Fuck!’
    Death Boy’s troosers were round his ankies. The only vein in his body that hadna bin driven into hiding was in his cock.
    ‘I told yuz nivir ivir to talk to uz when Aym trackin a vein,’ snarled Death Boy.
    ‘That way I needna fucking talk ta ya at all,’ said Wanker, slumped in the corner, weirdly fascinated by the sour stench of his own vomit, rising off of his soiled Iggy Pop tee-shirt. He was fixed ta the corner, as if some cunt with a nail gun had shot him through the hands and feet and crucified the sorry bastard to Death Boy’s floor. Deep in the despair a kenning that he coudna move in any direction, he pissed himself, feeling the warm flood fill his troosers, and at the same time evacuating his tormented bowels, with a mixture a relief, and a touch a pride at the thought that heed be leavin Death Boy’s gaff in an even worse state