21. The Book
'I do not confer praise or blame: I accept. I am the measure of all things. I am the centre of the world'
One of the strips of neon tubing is slowly dying, intermittent bursts of light and an angry buzzing like a hornet wired on caffeine. Even with her back to it she can see it flickering: reflected in the mirror; out of the corner of her eye.
And then there's the damn buzzing.
It drives her crazy, all of it, and in the end she can't take it anymore, drags her chair across, stands on it-
Not safe, the rational part of her thinks, screams, as the seat swivels and she twists precariously. She yanks the tube out of the fixture so hard it cracks.
A savage triumph. She climbs back down, tossing her hair out of her eyes and Jodie stares at her, despairing of her.
'What the hell?'
Ava ignores her, goes through the back-room, goes outside, dumps the broken neon-tube, lights a cigarette and drags the smoke in so fast and so deep that it hurts, burns.
Small-talk washes over her, the constant inane repetition of holiday plans and fights with boyfriends and husbands that might be straying and her nerves jangle with it. She keeps losing her grip on her scissors and it's a wonder that her clients don't end up bald or with a severed artery. Or both.
Jodie keeps throwing her worried looks and she snipes in response and when she's satisfied herself that she's had as miserable a day as is possible, she goes home.
She's not sure she really wants to go. She doesn't want the emptiness she knows will be there but maybe, maybe-
No.
He won't have changed his mind. She knows that.
And he's made a point of doing everything she's asked of him and she had told him to go.
She still can't quite believe that he did.
Hard-headed, her mama used to call her, and it was a kind of stubborness, that refusal to take back a word that she had said to him - although, almost every action she has taken, every decision she has made has done precisely that.
Actions are meant to speak louder than words, but then words mean so much to him.
In the house the silence is like thunder. It rolls around the rooms, low and heavy. Her footsteps echo, the sound of her own breathing loud. At the top of the stairs she hesitates, then makes the turn and pushes open the door of his- Of the spare room.
It's like he was never there, except that it's tidier than it was before. And the window is fully open, the curtain fluttering in the breeze that doesn't make it through the air thickened by silence.
She sits on the packing case and stares at nothing.
After she and Raylan had split-
She laughs to, at, herself. It makes it sound like they'd actually had a relationship, a proper one.
But after she had been too mad at Raylan to miss him. Then she was too busy being taken hostage and then after that worrying about Boyd and herself and that had taken up all of her time. She had had other things to think about, been exhausted by trying to put them both of them back together, so by the time Raylan turned up again, she had never really missed him at all.
There hadn't been the sickening hole somewhere above her stomach and the listlessness and the way everything seemed bleached of colour.
She pushes herself up from the packing case.
There's a scent, light, aftershave and something behind that, something she recognises from when she laid her head on his shoulder and breathed him in.
She picks up the book he's left behind on the neatly folded blanket. Old, the cover worn, some of the pages stained and starting to come away from the spine. Was it something he'd always had, she wonders, or just picked up along the way? Some passages are underlined and she wonders, again, if that was his hand. Has he left it for her, some message between its covers?
She leafs through it, her eyes resting on a few lines. They blur. She blinks hard, snaps it shut.
She isn't going to read the damn book. If there's something he wants to tell her he can say it to her face.
She carries it through and puts it on her bedside table.
But she will not, will not, read it.