No Mark Upon Her Read Online Free PDF

rowed, as he did every morning, or he’d be sculling up and down the
Thames with a big black dog paddling in his wake.
    Almost every morning, Kieran amended, when the
thunder rumbled again. He didn’t go out in storms. The boatshed shook in another
gust and the windows rattled in concert. He jerked involuntarily, pain searing
his hand. Glancing down, he saw a spot of blood on the fine sandpaper he’d been
using to smooth a fiberglass patch on the old Aylings double he had upside down
on trestles. He’d sanded his own damned knuckles. Shit. His hands were shaking
again.
    Finn whined and pushed his blunt snout against
Kieran’s knee. The thunder cracked again and the shed vibrated like a
kettledrum. Or an artillery barrage.
    “It’s just rain, boy.” Kieran heard the tremor in
his voice and grimaced in disgust. Some reassurance he was, sweating and quaking
like a leaf. Pathetic. Making an effort to steady his hand, he folded the
sandpaper and set it on his worktable.
    But even if he could make his hand obey, he had no
command over his knees. When they threatened to buckle, he staggered two steps
to the wall and slid down with his back against it. He felt as if the very air
were a massive weight, pressing him down, squeezing his lungs. Finn nuzzled him
and climbed half into his lap, and as he wrapped his arms round the dog, he
couldn’t tell which of them whimpered. “Sorry, boy, sorry,” he whispered. “It’ll
be okay. We’ll be okay. It’s just a little rain.”
    He repeated to himself the rational explanation for
his physical distress. Damage to middle ear, due to
shelling. Swift changes in barometric pressure may affect
equilibrium. It was a familiar mantra.
    The army doctors had told him that, as if he hadn’t
known it himself. They’d also told him that he’d been heavily concussed, and
that he’d suffered some loss of hearing. “Not enough,” he said aloud, and
cackled a little wildly at his own humor. Finn licked his chin and Kieran hugged
him harder. “It will pass,” he whispered, meaning to reassure them both.
    The room reeled, bringing a wave of nausea so
intense he had to swallow against it. That, too, was related to his middle ear,
or so they’d told him. An inconvenience, they’d said. He slid a little farther
down the wall, and Finn shifted the rest of his eighty-pound weight into his
lap.
    So inconvenient, along with the shakes and the
sweats and the screaming in his sleep, that they’d discharged him. Bye-bye, Kieran Connolly, Combat Medical Technician, Class 1,
and here’s your bit of decoration and your nice pension. He’d used
the pension to buy the boatshed.
    He’d rowed at Henley in his teens, crewing for a
London club. To a kid from Tottenham who’d stumbled across the Lea Rowing Club
quite by accident, Henley had seemed like paradise.
    It was just him and his dad, then. His mum had
scarpered when he was a baby, but it was not something his dad ever talked
about. They’d lived in a terraced street that had hung on to respectability by a
thread, his dad repairing and building furniture in the shop below the flat.
Kieran, white and Irish in a part of north London where that made him a
minority, had been well on his way to life as a petty thug.
    Kieran stroked Finn’s warm muzzle and closed his
eyes, trying to use the memory to quell the panic, the way the army therapist
had taught him.
    It had been hot, that long ago Saturday in June,
just after his fourteenth birthday. He’d stolen a bike on a dare, ridden it in a
wild, heart-hammering escape through the streets of Tottenham to the path that
ran down along the River Lea. And then, with the trail clear behind him, his
legs burning and the sun beating down on his head, he’d seen the single shells
on the water.
    The sound of the storm faded from his consciousness
as the memory drew him in.
    He’d stopped, gazing at the water, all thought of
pursuit and punishment gone in an instant. The boats were stillness in