It had one of those faded-brown, plain covers, like you’d find in second-hand book shops by the sea, the sort you went into hoping for the latest Terry Pratchett for a couple of quid, and found instead ‘Bird watching in Snowdonia’, and ‘Getting the most from your Bread maker’.
It was on her desk, surrounded by her craft things, shoelace ties of thin wool and her jars of buttons and beads. Her mates took the piss on a regular basis, convinced that cross-stitch for the under sixties was some form of obscure torture, or the sign of a mind cracking beneath the weight of managing a bank. She didn’t bother mention that the sum total of her management stress involved making sure three twenty year olds turned up on time and didn’t steal anything.
It wasn’t looking at her, just, sitting, taking up space. She draped a piece of material over it and went to cook dinner, unconscious of the regular glances she threw toward the spare bedroom whilst steaming carrots and frying salmon. The normal twinge of loneliness she felt as she made her meal for one was absent tonight, pushed out in favour of her curiosity.
Once the washing up was done, lunch prepped for the next day, and the lounge hoovered, the excuses dried up and she found herself pushing open the door of the spare room, peering around it as if expecting to find some bizarre creature hidden within. Instead she found her craft table, strewn with the usual supplies, and the book lying prone amongst them.
She whipped the cloth away, breath held, and when it didn’t attack her (slightly disappointing), she picked it up and wandered into the lounge. Curling up on the sofa, and shivering again as she remembered the disappearing act of the man in the park, she cracked the first page.
LIFE
No author, no copyright, nothing, just the title. This was reaching a whole new level of weird. She turned though a couple of blank pages, and reached the opening chapter.
It began in a hospital, the cacophony of a children’s ward, and a woman giving birth. It was well written and she was drawn in, the agony of childbirth brought home to her as it had never been before. She had no kids, and no real desire for them either, to the disbelief of everyone and anyone she ever spoke to about them. Reading this convinced her she had made the right choice.
When the baby was born, the language changed, becoming simpler and less colourful. It described the first days in detail and her mind began to wander. This monotony was exactly why she had ran from the thought of motherhood in the first place. She skipped forward, and found the same thing. Jumping again, she found the baby’s first birthday, which was slightly more interesting, featuring as it did, both jelly and vomit, but it was still a long way from gripping.
Swathes of the book passed with nothing more exciting than a scratched knee, or full nappy, and she abruptly shut it, staring at the brown cover, forehead creased. She had been excited, expectant, but now all she could think about was the half empty bottle of red in the kitchen and what time Holby City was on. There had to be more. Perhaps it had a killer ending.
She reopened it, randomly, and came to a driving test. As she read through every turn and maneuver, a chill settled in her body, as if she had been sat in a draft for too long. The hair on her neck stood up and she shook her head.
“No way, absolutely not, not a chance.”
She slammed the book closed again, stood up and let it fall to the carpet. She paced away to the door, then turned and stared down at it, like a hunter faced with a rare, but poisonous snake. It didn’t stare back. She thought it should. She rushed into the kitchen, grabbed the wine and a glass, then a knife, then went back into the lounge. The book was where she had left it and she looked at the knife, clutched in knuckles that were white and spoke into the silence of her living room.
“It was a coincidence, there’s no way that’s what it is, so just, calm down. The guy played some clever trick just, put the knife down, step away from the knife.”
She placed it carefully on the side table, stepped over to her chair and put her wine and glass on the floor next to it, glancing at the book as she did. Another shiver went through her and she stepped back and grabbed the knife. Setting it next to the wine, she sat and picked the book up between thumb and forefinger, examining it like a surgeon would a faulty organ, eyes squinting and face screwed up.
It would be easy to tell.
She found the driving test again, reading from where she had left off. When she came to the part where the driving instructor put his hand on her leg, she squeaked a high-pitched yelp and threw the book across the room, pulling the pillow in front of her and scrabbling for the knife. She succeeded only in knocking the wine over, which led to her running back and forth between the kitchen, cloth and bowl in hand. By the time she sat down, the remains of the red in her glass, she had already convinced herself that it was a trick. Downing the wine, she retrieved the book, and checked a few more things.
Sure enough, when the girl was sixteen, Charlie Stevens dumped her at the prom, leaving her to walk home alone in tears. When she was twenty one, she got knocked off her bike and walked to A&E on a broken ankle. When she was twenty eight, the man she loved died in a car accident, and her heart caved in. Everything was here. Her dodgy teenage poetry was written out verbatim, even the scribbling out. The first time she had sex was described in detail and she blushed as she sat alone in her lounge, reading the story of her life.
