The Voices Read Online Free PDF

on a sexually confident persona. Around the house there were cupboards filled with old editions of magazines with Laura posing on the covers: auburn hair disproportionately thick and styled; her eyes, a pale, delicate brown – so pale, in fact, that they turned gold in a certain light. Lips parted, glossed, glistening.
    Christopher missed her – that woman. The woman he had married.
    They had met six years earlier at a party, a glitzy affair attended mostly by people in film. Laura was therebecause, at that point in her life, she was getting bored with modelling and wanted to become an actress. Christopher couldn’t remember their conversation, but he could remember Laura’s eyes, the way that her irises changed colour, from brown, through amber, to gold.
    Two weeks later she was sitting, cross-legged, on the floor of his little mews house in Maida Vale and looking through his LP collection. She was curious about his musical tastes. Remarkably, she had heard of Stock-hausen and appeared to be impressed when Christopher mentioned that he and Stockhausen had once been acquaintances. They made love for the first time that afternoon. There was no shyness or anxiety, no awkward fumbling. It felt entirely natural – the removal of clothes, the stroking and the kissing, everything flowing inexorably towards a rapturous climax and the mute tranquillity of post-coital exhaustion. Christopher had wondered if their physical compatibility wasn’t, in some abstruse way, significant? He asked himself if it wasn’t just chance that had brought them together, but a loftier intercessional power – destiny, fate? He had been forty-two and she had been twenty-four. The neat symmetry of this numerical reversal, with its suggestion of arcane influence, had played on his mind. The idea that theirunion might be preordained was one that, until very recently, had occupied a central position in his personal mythology: the story he told himself, about himself.
    Laura went to the bathroom. When she returned, she climbed back into bed and lay on her side, facing away from Christopher. He edged across the mattress and wrapped an arm around her waist.
    Before long, he was thinking about Android Insurrection, a particular scene in which an army of humanoid robots goose-stepped down an enormous ramp. Christopher knew what was required: an accompaniment made from percussive tape loops. He possessed a very vivid, auditory imagination, and his tired brain, without much effort, invented effects that he hoped to reproduce in the studio the following day.
    Christopher slipped in and out of consciousness. Just as he was about to make what felt like a final descent into oblivion, he heard a knocking sound coming from the baby monitor: a distant rat-a-tat-tat through the hiss. It delivered him back again to wakefulness.
    ‘Did you hear that?’ he said.
    ‘Hear what?’ Laura replied.
    ‘The monitor. I thought I heard something.’
    ‘I didn’t hear anything.’
    ‘Are you sure?’
    Her voice hardened. ‘You were dropping off – I could tell from your breathing.’
    ‘OK.’ Christopher rested his cheek against his wife’s shoulder blade. He had intended to go back to sleep but he was soon agitated by a growing sense of unease. Faye. He should check on Faye, just in case. A question arose in his mind: in case of what, exactly? His unease was not connected with any readily identifiable threat but he found himself motivated to get out of bed.
    ‘What are you doing?’ Laura asked.
    ‘I’ll be back in a second,’ he answered, unwilling to justify his behaviour. He pressed the light switch on the landing wall and entered the nursery. Leaning over the cot, he studied his daughter. She seemed to coalesce out of the darkness, gradually acquiring shape and substance. Her face was the last thing to clarify. Christopher listened for the reassuring rhythm of her respiration and relaxed. He felt somewhat self-conscious, even a little embarrassed.
    When he