shadows.
My hand is real. I examine it as I write. My body is real. My vagina is real. My breasts are real. I can still feel AR’s weight on top of me, inside me. My whole being throbbing. Lungs filling. Such exquisite pain. I am, I am, I am.
Brook turned the page to a fresh entry.
Dad’s face when I told Mum I was going out with someone (AR). I could almost hear the blood rushing to his head. He was in the next room but I didn’t have to shout. He listens to everything I say with bated breath. Words are so powerful. To think the word ‘boyfriend’ can deliver such a kick in the teeth. It was all I could do not to march in there and laugh in his spluttering face. And Mother? Stupid bitch. She doesn’t even know what her man is thinking, wanting. I could’ve kept AR secret and let Dad keep hoping, but I need to crush his heart now. I can’t go on. I can’t stand being around him. My own father. He comes to stand next to me just to smell me, like I’m prey. I’ve ignored his sly looks at my body too long, his enthusiastic hugs. Think I don’t know you lie on my bed when I’m not home, Dad? Give it up. I don’t want to dress like a nun around you. I don’t want to cover my tits. Cover your eyes, old man. Cover your eyes.
Brook read the last entry again. Jim Watson was telling the truth. Surely he would have removed that last section, had he been censoring his daughter’s thoughts. The missing pages must have been cut by someone else. Adele? It seemed likely.
Brook picked up the ESDA copy of the page below the absent pages. The technicians had not picked up all the text with the Electrostatic Detection Apparatus but there was enough to show that Adele had created the script for the leaflet.
Brook turned back to the diary and read other entries.
A strange boy joined our literature group. Russell Thomson. He hardly speaks and he can’t bear to look people in the eye. He has a camcorder on his wrist and doesn’t take it off. He looks like he has Special Needs and even Wilson thinks he’s smarter than him but he’s wrong. There’s something about him. I don’t know. It’s like he knows something that the rest of us can never know and he’s just working out a way to explain it to us. I saw him with his mum the other day. She’s beautiful and it’s hard to imagine the two are related. Wilson saw her too and was all over her like a ten year old with a toffee apple. He says he’s going to pop her if it’s the last thing he does. Bad boy. Dirty boy.
Then it was back to her relationship with Rifkind and the passion spilled off the page again.
Adam Fucking Rifkind. No more secrecy. No more sneaking around. No more AR code, Adam Fucking Rifkind. I should Facebook the shit out of your guilty secret, then where would you be? You think you’re a god to women. Is that why you don’t want me and say you don’t love me? You only love yourself. You want your slag of a wife and the brand new screaming receptacle of piss and shit she’s carrying. Fuck you, Adam Rifkind. (Good title for a poem.) Fuck everything about you. And another thing. Your novel is shit. You think you’re God’s gift to literature. You’re not. No more suggestions from me. Or is that the point? I’ve cured your infantile story, put a line through the puerile, and you don’t need me now.
Brook smiled. Rifkind in a nutshell. Adele was very astute. Was? He hoped she was alive, hoped she was too clever to give her life for fleeting fame and the momentary regret of loved ones.
He turned to her notebook of poems and read the piece that she’d composed on the blotter of her desk before transferring it to her notebook.
He looked at the clock. Gone midnight. He took a final sip of whisky. Why was he devoting so much time to this girl and her friends? They’d run away and didn’t want to be found. They weren’t dead, he was sure of it — almost sure. Not like Phil Ward. Phil was out there, facing death. In his mind, Brook had already signed the death certificate.
Concentrate on the hope. Terri had come through, survived her crisis without him. She didn’t need him any more. Perhaps she never did. Concentrate on Adele. Adele was alive. Adele was his daughter now. He could still save her. He could be a proper father to her. He could pore over her life in the reasonable knowledge that he’d never have to stand over her alabaster corpse. He could read her deepest darkest thoughts, and take comfort from the notion that one day they might actually meet, while deep in his subconscious Brook knew that the next time he saw Phil Ward, he would be on a mortuary slab. What good was his lap and a half now?
With a feeling of dread, Brook picked up Adele’s diary and turned to the copy of the final page again. He reread the three words and tried to put a positive spin on them. She was referring to the end of her life as it had been lived to this point — looking forward to the new, to her rebirth as an internet celebrity. That had to be it. That had to be the meaning.
Nineteen
After three hours’ sleep, Brook tiptoed down the stairs early next morning and made tea. He caught sight of his head in the kitchen window. He’d removed the bandage and replaced it with a plaster over the stitches. The area was still swollen and the bruising was beginning to colour.
He took his tea into the tiny office at the back of the cottage, turned on his computer, typed in the Deity address and loaded the page. For no particular reason he watched the archived footage of both Deity broadcasts again but gleaned no fresh inspiration. The countdown to the next broadcast had dipped under eleven hours.
He decided to search sites with information on Ancient Egyptian burial rites and clicked on a few, confirming some of Dr Petty’s conclusions about The Embalmer’s treatment of the vagrants’ bodies. He read up on the procedures. Petty was right. The Ancient Egyptians believed the heart, rather than the brain, was the seat of emotions and was necessary for the dead to proceed safely to the afterlife. After the organs were removed, including the brain through the nostrils, the heart was put back into the cavity as it had been with McTiernan and Kirk.
He read more information on embalming and made a list of some of the chemicals required. Maybe they could find Ozzy that way. Brook sniffed the air and then his arm. He could still smell whisky despite a shower and change of clothes. He looked around and spied the whisky glass he’d used the previous night. It still had a few dregs in it. Brook picked it up and padded into the kitchen to make more tea.
He was about to rinse out the leaded tumbler when he stopped and looked at the pale golden liquid. He stared for a few seconds then washed out the glass and opened a cupboard to put it away. There was a loaf of sliced bread in there. Terri had bought it for her breakfasts. Brook gazed at it in confusion while he thought things through. A moment later he broke into a grin and returned to the computer.
‘And people worry about my mental health,’ he said, typing another topic into the search engine.
Half an hour later, Brook was sitting contentedly on the garden bench sucking in the cool damp air and
