My Absolute Darling: The Sunday Times bestseller - Gabriel Tallent

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how far he can go and he will take you right to the brink, and then he will see he has come to the brink and he will step back; but perhaps not, perhaps he will go too far, or perhaps there is no such calculation in him.

      An itch is developing on her lower back. She runs her hand along the waistline of her jeans and finds the tick just above the elastic of her panties. She can feel its pearl-smooth body.

      “Brett?” she breathes, unbelting her pants and removing the holster, sliding it deeper into the bag to hide it. “Jacob?”

      “Yeah?” Jacob breathes back.

      “Do you have tweezers?”

      “Brett does,” Jacob says, “in his bag.” She hears Jacob sit up in the dark. He rustles around in the bag for seemingly a very long time before he finds them.

      “Got them,” he says. “Tick?”

      “Yeah, tick,” she says.

      “Where is it?”

      “Low down on my back.”

      “All right,” he says.

      “I can’t get it myself,” she says.

      “All right.”

      She rolls over onto her belly, hitches her jeans down and her shirt up to bare her lower back. Jacob crawls quietly over to her, trying not to disturb the sleeping Brett. She lies with her cheek resting on the cold black plastic of the ground cloth. Jacob kneels beside her. He turns the headlamp on, and they are bathed in its blue glow.

      “I’ve never done this before,” he says.

      “Get the head,” she says.

      “Do you twist it clockwise?” he asks. “I’ve heard they screw themselves in. Their mouthparts are an auger.”

      “No. It’ll vomit out its stomach contents when you start on it. Just pull it straight out in one go if you can,” she says.

      “Okay,” he says. He puts one hand on the small of her back, framing the tick between thumb and forefinger. His hand is warm and confident, her skin ringing electric. Her vision is narrowly of the black ground cloth, dirty, lapped up in wrinkles, but her focus is entirely on him, unseen, bending over her.

      “Just do it,” she says.

      He is silent. She feels the tweezers fasten down on the tick. They bite into her flesh, and then there is a plucking sensation.

      “You get it all?” she says.

      “I got it,” he says.

      “You get it all?”

      “I got it all, Turtle.”

      “Good,” she says. She hitches her T-shirt down and rolls back over. She can hear Jacob crushing the tick to death with the tweezer points. The rain drums on the tarp stretched taut above them. Jacob switches off the light, and she listens to them, there in the dark with her.

       Seven

      TURTLE AWAKES WITH A START, HEART POUNDING, AND WAITS, listening, eyes gummy from her dehydration, her mouth leathery. Someone has kicked the center pole away and the tarp hangs down cupped and half full of water, sunken leaves forming a black circle of detritus at the bottom. She waits, breathing, wondering what woke her, if Martin is standing outside, beside this stump, with his auto shotgun. Slowly, silently she draws the Sig Sauer and touches it to her cheek, the steel almost warm from the captured heat of the sleeping quilt. She can hear her own labored breath. She thinks, calm down, but she cannot calm down and she begins to breathe harder, and she thinks, this is bad, this is very bad.

      Something strikes the water and Turtle jerks, watches a fist-sized object comet through the water toward her, touch the tarp, and float away. She waits, the gun held against her face in two shaking hands. It is a pinecone, probably a bishop pinecone. This is what woke her: the cones splashing into the pool and striking the tarp. She takes a deep breath, and then startles as a second cone strikes the water and plunges down, slowing as it comes toward her. It touches the tarp, and then floats up and away. Ripples expand across the surface. Their shadows lave across the boys, the sleeping bags, the backpacks, the mess of this little hovel. She thinks, I love everything of theirs because it is theirs, and I like how crowded we are here with things, the riot and disorder, everything damp and warm, and she thinks, I love it. She pushes her feet down against the wet nylon of Jacob’s sleeping bag. She lies, her muscles loosening, and when she can, she holsters the gun and waits with her hands on her throat, looking up at the pool. She wants to draw the gun and cannot bear to lie there without it, and she puts her hand on the grip and touches the uncocked hammer and she thinks, leave it, leave it, and she takes her hand away and lies listening to the water above and to the forest beyond.

      She thinks, for a moment, I was sure it was him and the only thing I didn’t know was how far he would go, and how angry he would be. She thinks, he has always been able to surprise me. When she is calm again she climbs out, slithering awkwardly through a gap between the tarp and the stump. She sits on the stump’s crown, barefoot, jeans sodden and cleaving to her thighs, drinking from the tarp water.

      She drops off the stump and sits on a log covered in translucent mushrooms shaped like deformed ears. She draws her knife and begins cleaning thorns and slivers from her callused feet. Around her, wild ginger grows among the redwood roots, its leaves dark green and heart-shaped, its purple flowers, with their open throats and liver-colored tusks, deeply buried in the foliage. She puts her fist against her forehead. If something happens to them, she thinks, what are you doing, Turtle? You are forgetting who you are and you are thinking that you can be someone else, and you will get yourself hurt and you will get Martin hurt, and god help you, you will get these boys hurt and that is the worst of it, but somehow you cannot care so much for the risk they are taking, being with you. It seems worth the risk and that shows that you aren’t thinking clearly, because it isn’t worth the risk, not for them, not if you put the question to them, and not if you could explain how far your daddy might go. She thinks, I know that he came after me and the only question is if he could find me out here, and I bet he could, but I don’t know. She thinks, I can’t seem to get that answer straight, because sometimes I think of him, and it seems to me he could do anything. He could, she thinks, hurt these boys. She knows that and she thinks, don’t think of it.

      She thinks, it is light enough now. I could make it back and it wouldn’t even be hard, except—what are you giving up on, if you do that? She thinks, you know exactly what you’re giving up on, and the question is, what are you willing to risk? When it comes down to it, she thinks, I am willing to risk a great deal. I am willing to risk these boys and it’s just for myself and it’s nothing to them, they don’t even know, and I won’t even tell them. She thinks, if they find out, they find out, and I will take that risk because I am a bitch.

      Before long, Jacob crawls out and climbs with difficulty down the stump’s side. He sits beside her and looks at her feet, which are small, with painfully high arches. They look lathed almost, or worked, articulated tendons and bones without any softness. Her callus is contoured like a streambed and grained like a fingerprint. Jacob watches for a moment. She is glad to see him, and she is particularly glad to see him because of the risks she is taking to make it possible. He doesn’t know what he is involved in and it makes the moment of sitting on the log, beside him, important to her.

      He says, “Well, that’s strangely attractive.” He nods to where she is digging into the callus with the knifepoint. His voice is guileless but full of humor, and she smiles despite herself. She does not know if he is making fun of her or if he is making fun of himself, and then, immediately after her smile, she understands.

      She stiffens, stooped over her feet with knife in hand, tightening her jaw, acutely aware of her bitch face and ugly skin. Her whiteness is ugly and uneven, she knows, a freckled semitransparent whiteness so that her boobs, pathetically small and milkily untanned, are almost blue.

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