The Evil Seed Read Online Free PDF

was waiting for me. So be
careful.
    When the time comes,
much may depend upon which way I turn you.

 
     
     
     
     
    Two
     
     
    ALL THAT DAY ALICE HAD BEEN RESTLESS. NOW
SHE NIBBLED her way through a packet of biscuits, turned the television on. A
black-and-white film, a chat-show, a Russian cartoon.., she turned it off.
    She made some tea, sat
down, let the tea go cold, poured it down the sink, put on a record, played it
twice without hearing it, took it off.
    Then she reached for the
letter from her contact at Red Rose and tried to re-awaken her interest in the
illustrator’s job they had offered her. It was a fairly easy one — six
line-drawings and a book jacket for a teen romance called Heartbreak High. It
should have been easy, Alice thought; and yet she had wasted most of the day
filling the waste-basket with half-finished sketches, until finally she
admitted to herself that it was seeing that girl with Joe that had done it,
hearing his voice so unexpectedly.
    Not that it mattered now
of course. It was over. End of topic.
    And yet tonight, it felt
lonely. Just for tonight, it might be good to hear the phone ring. A fleeting
query from her subconscious (something inside me remembers…); but who would remember her if she disappeared tomorrow? Her mother, keeping the faith for
her vanished ones two hundred miles away? Her contact at Red Rose? The only
friends she had had were also Joe’s friends; she had lost them when she lost
Joe. And while times had been good, she had not felt the need for anyone
outside him. Damn. A sudden rage at herself overpowered Alice. Why couldn’t she
let it go? Part of it was seeing that gravestone, the inexplicable sense of envy for the dead girl whose lover would not forget.
    She considered ringing
up her mother in Leeds, the only person outside her work from whom she ever
received phone calls, then she shrugged and sat down again. No. It would be
nice to hear her mother’s voice, but ringing her would simply open the doorway
to all the usual reproaches and criticisms and enquiries:
    ‘When are you going to
come and visit us?’ ‘Have you got a job yet?’ (As if what Alice was doing for a
living were some kind of a hobby in preparation for ‘real work’.) ‘Are you sure
you’re looking after yourself?’
    Poor Mother, thought
Alice, Mother who had grown harder and sharper with the years after the cancer
finally got Dad, Mother whose sweetness had become buried under all the extra
flesh she had put on since turning fifty, and who always spoke in the same
careful code, never quite saying what she meant, perhaps never quite finding the
words.
    She had been bright
once: black-and-white photographs showed a dark, narrow-waisted girl with a
lovely smile, arm-in-arm with the handsome young man Dad had been before he
lost his hair so early. She had been romantic enough to call her little girl
Alice after Alice in Wonderland. ‘Because,’ she said, ‘you had just the same
kind of wide astonished eyes.’ But now she was a disappointed fat woman,
coarsened and faded not by grief but by the constant erosion of joyless days
passing; and the worst of it was that, some day, Alice was terribly afraid that
she might look into the mirror and see her mother’s face staring out at her.
    Alice sighed and looked
at the clock. Half past ten. She supposed she ought to go to bed soon, but didn’t
feel tired. She reached across to the bookshelf, chose a paperback at random,
hoping to put herself to sleep by reading a few pages. There might be some
leftover chocolate ice-cream in the ice-box, she thought; she couldn’t
remember. She went to the fridge to check, thinking vaguely that she was eating
too much nowadays and that she ought to try and cut down. She suppressed the
image of her mother, sitting in the lounge in their old house soon after Dad
died, eating packets of prawn cocktail crisps with a blank-eyed, ferocious
energy.
    Bottles clinked inside
the fridge door, and the four cats