Sweet Agony Read Online Free PDF Page B

many times in the past. I never really wanted to go to the library anyway; I wasn’t actually interested in that notebook for Christmas; I don’t even know what Christmas is. Christmas is just like any other day, so macaroni cheese alone in the bathroom is fine. All of my life is fine, everything is fine, I swear it is, it really is…until I get to my room and the letter is there.

    Until I open it and find the following:
    ‘Are you threatening me with theft of my chest hair, Ms Parker? If so you should know I barely have enough to make such an enterprise worthwhile. You could probably remove it all simply by blowing in my general direction, though doing so will earn you as much admonition as if you had snuck into my room and plucked each one with a pair of tweezers.’
    And then I finally understand what I was really doing all along. I wasn’t fine at all; I was just settling. I didn’t stave off disappointment by opening the door for it; I just let it into the room with me sooner. I pulled up a chair for it and pretended we were friends, even though it spat in my face and stole everything I had.
    It took the joy out of my life, and I know that now because when I read those ridiculous words all of it comes flooding back into me in one long glorious gush. My body fills with a delirious happiness – and all over something so simple and small. He just plays along with me. That’s all he does and yet that is all it takes.
    Just someone to write insanely overblown letters about hair thievery with. Someone who is so into it that when I go to take out a pen and paper to reply I find stationery, the same sort as he has been using. I find beautiful envelopes and little cream cards and a pen, oh, God, a fountain pen . Does he know how often I sat in my diseased mess of a high school and dreamed of using a fountain pen? How I would close my eyes and will away the biro in my hand and replace it with something so like this I could cry?
    I do cry, when I come across the wax and the seal.
    He has even gone to the trouble of making a seal for me. It has my initials linked in a regal-looking loop, as though when he time-travelled to another century he took me with him. Now we get to live out this nineteenth-century fantasy together, and, oh, it is bliss . So much so that the next note I send almost tells him that very thing.
    ‘This is the best thing that has ever happened to me’, I think of writing, and even though I manage to contain myself I do a lot of other inadvisable things. I step too jauntily and search for him without meaning to and, most ridiculously and unexpectedly, I catch myself singing. I have never sung in my life.

    But I do. There I am, minding my own business, when suddenly it just bursts out of me. And, true, his dusty old record collection is probably partly to blame. I saw the title of one of them only seconds before, and it was a song I happened to know. Yet, even so, it kind of shocks me – and not just because it’s me trilling away.
    There is also the line I choose to sing.
    ‘When you kiss me heaven sighs,’ I sing, so full of feeling that I want to stop before it gets any worse. Before he hears me, and thinks I mean that he is the kisser I’m imagining, when I promise he absolutely is not. He is not my ‘La Vie En Rose’, all right?
    Not even when I hear a sound from the other side of the house.
    One that falters and fails and fumbles into something, when I sing the next line of the song. ‘Give your heart and soul to me,’ I sing, and there it is again. First one note, fine and high, and then another and another, each clearer than the last, until I have to accept the stone-cold truth: that is him playing the piano. Somewhere in the house he is tentatively accompanying my painful singing, and so beautifully that I could never mistake it for anything but what it is.
    He is saying back to me what I swear I was not suggesting.
    Good God, is he really saying back to me what I swear I was not