Toby's Room Read Online Free PDF Page B

boy in the garden playing with a girl whom nobody else could see. ‘Mother doesn’t even know where she’s buried.’
    ‘Buried?’
    ‘Well, yes. They wouldn’t –’
    ‘It’s in a museum, a
medical
museum. Edinburgh, I think.’ His eyes slid away. ‘They are quite rare.’
    ‘So what happened? The doctor gave her to a museum?’
    He looked down.
    ‘No. Dad wouldn’t do that,’ she said. ‘His own flesh and blood?’
    ‘Oh, listen to yourself: “His own flesh and blood.” He’s a scientist, for God’s sake.’
    ‘I can see it mightn’t be much of a barrier to you.’
    They’d got there, by a rather circular route, but there, nevertheless. She watched the Adam’s apple jerking in his throat. Like everything else about him, it seemed to be trying to escape.
    ‘You came to me,’ he said. ‘I’ll take ninety per cent of the blame, but I won’t take it all.’
    It was impossible to speak without crying, and she was determined not to cry. So she said nothing, sitting there with her face in her hands and her eyes closed. After a moment, she felt him get up and come to stand behind her again. He reached out, but stopped just short of touching her shoulder, though close enough for her to feel the heat of his fingertips. She remembered the sea-anemone groping of his mouth, the shock of his harsh bristles on her skin.
    ‘If you like, I’ll stay away from you,’ he said. ‘You won’t have to see me again.’
    Christmas? Birthdays?
    She put up a hand and twined her fingers round his. ‘You know I don’t want that.’
    ‘Neither do I.’
    They looked at each other in the glass, then for the first time she turned to face him directly. He touched the side of her face, lowered his head … With his mouth less than an inch away from hers, he recoiled violently, almost as if some external force had grabbed him by the hair and pulled him off. Breathing heavily, he said, ‘We’ve got to get back to the way things were.’
    ‘I don’t know how they were.’
    ‘We were friends.’
    She shook her head. ‘No. If we’d been friends it would never have happened.’
    ‘We’ve got to try. Sis?’
    ‘Yes, I suppose we do.
Bro
.’
    He took a short step back. Released.
    ‘I’ve brought my anatomy textbooks. You must be starting the course soon.’
    How easily he’d returned to ‘normal’. She felt a spasm of anger, but relief too. A minute ago, she’d thought it was starting again, andshe wasn’t sure she could have stopped him, or herself. Because he was right, she’d gone to him, gone in bewilderment and ignorance, nursing vague childish schemes of revenge, yes, but had that been her only motivation? The more she thought about that night the more … complicit she felt.
    Now, she followed him through into the living room; they sat on the sofa, side by side, and talked about the anatomy course she’d be starting on Monday. And after a while, things did begin to seem normal, almost normal, though she noticed he sat a few feet away from her, about as far away as he could get. Even so, there seemed to be no space between them. If she closed her eyes for a second, she could feel the prickle of their shared sweat on her thigh.
    Anatomy was Toby’s favourite subject, his passion, and he was a good teacher. As he talked, she forgot to feel distaste for the scurf of human skin on his notes, and simply marvelled, as he did, at the beauty and complexity of what lay beneath.
    ‘You’ll enjoy it, sis, honestly you will. Bit of a shock at first, but you soon get over that. I’m sure once you get the hang of it, it’ll really help your drawing, and then,
wow
– the next Michelangelo.’
    ‘I don’t like muscly men.’
    ‘Oh, well, never mind …’
    He stayed for exactly one hour. It was like a tutorial. When he got up to go, she accompanied him to the front door, not wanting to be left, too abruptly, in a room that would still be full of his presence. He called her ‘sis’ again as he said goodbye. She