The Whisperer Read Online Free PDF

hint of softness. As if being a woman were an evil to be eradicated. Even though she often wore male clothes, she wasn’t masculine. There was simply nothing about her that suggested a sexual identity. And that was how she wanted to appear. Her clothes were anonymous. Jeans that weren’t too tight, worn trainers, leather jacket. They were clothes, and that was that. Their function was to keep her warm or cover her up. She didn’t waste time choosing them, she just bought them. Lots of them were identical. She didn’t care. That was how she wanted to be.
    Invisible among the invisible.
    Perhaps that was also how she was able to share the district changing room with the male officers.
    Mila had spent ten minutes staring at her open locker as she ran through all the day’s events. There was something she had to do, but her mind was elsewhere at the moment. Then a stabbing pain in her thigh brought her back to herself. The wound had opened up again; she had tried to staunch the blood with a tissue and sticky tape, but it hadn’t worked. The flaps of skin around the cut were too short and she hadn’t been able to do a good job with needle and thread. Perhaps this time she really would have to consult a doctor, but she didn’t want to go to hospital. Too many questions. She decided she would put on a tighter bandage, in the hope that the bleeding would stop, then try again with new stitches. But she would have to take an antibiotic to avoid contracting an infection. She would get a fake prescription from one of her contacts who gave her information every now and again about the new arrivals among the homeless at the railway station.
    Stations.
    It’s strange, thought Mila. While for the rest of the world they’re only a place you pass through, for some they’re a terminus. They stop there and they don’t leave again. Stations are a kind of ante-hell, where lost souls congregate in the hope that someone will come and collect them.
    An average of twenty to twenty-five individuals disappear every day. Mila knew the statistic very well. All of a sudden these people vanish without warning, without a suitcase. As if they had dissolved into nothing.
    Mila knew that most of them were misfits, people who lived off drugs and dodges, always ready to sully themselves with crime, individuals who were constantly in and out of jail. But there were also some—a strange minority—who at some point in their lives decided to vanish forever. Like the mother who went shopping at the supermarket and didn’t come home, or the son or brother who boarded a train never to reach their destination.
    Mila’s belief was that each one of us has a path. A path that leads to home, to our dear ones, to the things we are most bound to. Usually the path is always the same; we learn it as children, and each of us follows it for the whole of our lives. But sometimes the path breaks. Sometimes it starts again somewhere else. Or, after following a series of twists and turns, it returns to the point where it broke. Or else it remains hanging there.
    Sometimes, however, it is lost in the darkness.
    Mila knew that more than half of those who disappear come back and tell a story. Some, though, have nothing to tell, and resume their lives as before. Others are less fortunate; all that remains of them is a mute and silent body. Then there are the ones you never hear about again.
    Amongst those there is always a child.
    There are parents who would give their lives to know what happened. Where they went wrong. What act of negligence produced this silent drama. What happened to their little one. Who took their child, and why. There are those who question God, asking what sin they are being punished for. Those who torment themselves for the rest of their days in search of answers, or who die pursuing those questions. “Let me know at least if he is dead,” they say. Some end up wishing it was so, because they want only to weep. Their sole desire is not to give up,