The Course of the Heart Read Online Free PDF Page B

past six, but everything was dark and untenanted. All I could hear was the wind rustling the black plastic bags of rubbish piled round the dustbins.
    Civilization—if it could be called that—made its bench-mark on the Pennine moors with water and railways, the great civil engineering projects of the nineteenth century. Things have been at ebb since. Over in Longdendale and the Chew Valley, the dams and chains of reservoirs endure, but their architecture is monolithic and not to scale. The human remains of these sites of obsession—handfuls of houses, some quarry workings, a graveyard—are scattered. There is nothing left for people. A few farmers hang on. Myra Hindley and Ian Brady, the “Moors Murderers” of the 1960s, had buried their victims not far from Pam’s cottage. Otherwise the spoil heaps and derelict shooting boxes have nothing to guard but an emptiness. I felt pursued despite that.
    “Fuck you, Lucas,” I whispered. “Fuck you then.”
    * * *
    Pam’s house was as silent as the rest.
    I went into the front garden and pressed my face up to the window, in case I could see into the kitchen through the open living-room door. But from that angle the only thing visible was a wall calendar with a color photograph of a Persian cat: October.
    I couldn’t see Pam.
    I stood in the flower bed. The sleet turned to snow. Eventually I made myself go in.
    The kitchen was filled less with the smell of vomit than a sourness you felt somewhere in the back of your throat. Outside, the passage lay deserted under the bright suicidal wash of fluorescent light. It was hard to imagine anything had happened out there. At the same time nothing looked comfortable, not the disposition of the old roof slates, or the clumps of fern growing out of the revetment, or even the way the snow was settling in the gaps between the flagstones. I found that I didn’t want to turn my back on the window. If I closed my eyes and tried to visualize the white couple, all I could remember was the way they had smiled. A still, cold air seeped in above the sink, and the cats came to rub against my legs and get underfoot; the taps were still running.
    In her confusion Pam had opened all the kitchen cupboards and strewn their contents on the floor. Saucepans, cutlery and packets of dried food had been mixed up with a polythene bucket and some yellow J-cloths. She had upset a bottle of household detergent among several tins of cat food, some of which had been half opened, some merely pierced, before she dropped them or forgot where she had put the opener. It was hard to see what she had been trying to do. I picked it all up and put it away. To make them leave me alone, I fed the cats. Once or twice I heard her moving about on the floor above.
    She was in the bathroom, slumped on the old-fashioned pink lino by the sink, trying to get her clothes off.
    “For God’s sake go away,” she said. “I can do it.”
    “Oh, Pam.”
    “Put some disinfectant in the blue bucket then.”
    * * *
    “Who are they, Pam?” I asked.
    That was later, when I had put her to bed. She answered: “Once it starts you never get free.”
    I was annoyed.
    “Free from what, Pam?”
    “You know,” she said. “Lucas said you had hallucinations for weeks afterwards.”
    “Lucas had no right to say that!”
    This sounded absurd, so I added as lightly as I could, “It was a long time ago. I’m not sure any more.”
    The migraine had left her exhausted, though much more relaxed. She had washed her hair, and between us we had found her a fresh nightdress to wear. Sitting up in the cheerful little bedroom with its cheap ornaments and modern wallpaper, she looked vague and young, free of pain. She kept apologizing for the design on her continental quilt, some bold diagrammatic flowers in black and red, the intertwined stems of which she traced with the index finger of her right hand across a clean white background. “Do you like this? I don’t really know why I bought it.