Precious Thing Read Online Free PDF

talked about all of them on TV. Relayed the details of each story clinically, using words like horrific, shock, brutal. They all rolled off the tongue. But I never really thought about the huge craters they left in people’s lives. Even when their relatives made desperate appeals from haunted faces all I got was a flutter of emotion that passed like wind. They were stories whose details and circumstances were a thousand times removed from me. You couldn’t have been any closer, Clara. You were real.
    ‘I’m. Not. Ready,’ I said.
    I didn’t look at Jake. I stared at the earpiece. It wasn’t my own. This one had been used by someone else, the crumb of orange/brown wax told me as much. I couldn’t take my eyes off it. ‘I can’t put this in my ear, look at it,’ I shouted.
    ‘For fuck’s sake, Rach, there’s no time.’ I must have been on my feet by then because I could feel the cameraman attaching the receiver to the belt on my trousers.
    ‘Tell them I’m not ready,’ I said. I thought I might cry, just fall down on to the floor and curl up and weep without caring who saw me. Instead I sunk my teeth into my lips again, I wanted to hurt, anything but this crippling numbness. The metallic taste of blood filled my mouth but still, I couldn’t feel a thing.
    ‘It’s the lead story.’ He watched me grip a chair, something solid to hold me up. His voice softened. ‘Come on, what do you want me to say? They want you on air before Global get their correspondent on. You know, first with the news and all that shit.’ He smiled and then bent down and rummaged in my bag.
    ‘Here,’ he said, handing me a bulging black purse that contained everything I needed for my TV face, ‘put some slap on, don’t want you to scare the viewers, do we? I’m going to see if DCI Gunn will do a one-to-one with you.’
    I took my make-up bag from him and glanced in the mirror of my powder compact. Blue lips on white, white skin stared back at me, swollen where I had bitten them. My eyes were lined with red. Without thinking I powdered my face with bronzer and then applied a crème blush in one shaky stroke of each cheek. And lipstick too, but my hand wouldn’t follow the contours of my mouth, so I wiped it off again. Then I heard sound waves coming through my ear. The cameraman must have slipped the earpiece in. I thought of the wax crumb sitting in my ear and shuddered.
    ‘Nice of you to join us, Rachel,’ the director’s voice said. And I wondered how I would escape now. ‘We have all of thirty seconds before we come to you, after these headlines. Give us a few words for level.’
    I looked around, desperate to grab Jake’s attention, but I could see he was at the other side of the room talking to Hilary Benson and DCI Gunn. ‘Rachel, some level please.’ The director’s voice was louder, more pissed off now. ‘We’re coming to you next.’
    I was trapped in front of the camera, in this surreal and nightmarish situation. I couldn’t run now; somehow I had to get through the next five minutes.
    Five minutes, five minutes, just do your job and then it’ll all be over.
    I tried to move my tongue to form words but it was burnt and brittle and hit my scorched mouth with a click-clack sound. My lips stuck to my teeth. I grabbed a bottle of water from my bag and gulped. It ran off the sides of my mouth without soaking in. ‘I’ll be talking about this level,’ I said, click-clack, wiping the sides of my mouth. And then I sounded your name out. Slowly, each syllable a word of its own. ‘Clara O’Connor was last seen …’ I looked down the lens to focus. I had no idea what I was going to say, what questions they would ask. My breaths were shallow, I tried to regulate them. I thought of foreign correspondents reporting from war zones with bullets whistling around their heads carrying on when everything was crashing down.
They could do it, so could I.
    ‘That’s great,’ said the director, interrupting my thoughts.