Chapter Fourteen #2
my own head. Coming out into the daylight again, seeing you, I feel kind of exposed, and my defenses go up. Forgive me?”
“If you let me read it, maybe . . .” Petra replied.
“Funny you should say,” Ross replied lightly, but there was a tiny tremor in his voice that made her look at him sharply.
Avoiding her gaze, his hand went back into his carrier bag and reappeared with an A4 cardboard folder. He proffered it to
her and she took it gingerly, still expecting a joke.
“I’m not going to find fifty typed pages with ‘All work and no play makes Ross a dull boy’ written on it, am I?”
“Only if I am now so inescapably insane, I don’t even know that’s what I’ve done.” He grinned. “Fun fact: That little detail in the film was Stanley Kubrick’s idea. It’s not in the book.”
“I didn’t know that,” Petra admitted. Stephen King was a genius of course, but horror was not her reading genre of choice.
Being allowed to watch The Shining by a babysitter when she was just ten years old had left her having nightmares about twins in pink dresses for weeks.
“It’s just the opening pages,” he explained. “First ten thousand words, more or less.”
“Sure. I’m looking forward to it,” she said, totally serious now. And she was. Suddenly, she could barely wait for him to
leave. “Thank you. For trusting me with it,” she said.
“No need to thank me. I owe you a favor if anything,” he replied. “Whatever I can do . . .”
“There is something actually,” Petra said, remembering her conversation with Flo that day. “We want to resurrect the kids’ story-reading
session in the shop. It’s just half an hour on market days. Lets the parents get on with their shopping in peace.”
“And makes them come in and buy books,” suggested Ross.
“Naturally.”
Ross winced. “Do I really have to?”
“Don’t you like kids?”
“No, it’s not that. I love kids.”
“Because you are one?”
“Yeah.” He smiled sheepishly. “But my concern is, how will this play with my whole incognito thing?”
“How many six-year-olds have read your first novel?”
“Only novel,” he corrected her absently. “Not fair though. They aren’t the people I’m hiding from.”
“Sure,” said Petra, “but you’ve been living here for months, and—even over the last few weeks without the beardy disguise—how
many people have recognized you?”
“You did.”
“Okay,” Petra amended patiently. “How many people—who don’t have a job where they are supposed to know this stuff—have recognized you?”
“Fair.” Ross made a face and thought for a long, silent moment. “Okay, I’ll do it,” he said.
“Great. Next Saturday, ten o’clock, we’ll provide the book. Feel free to practice some silly voices. Kids love silly voices.”
“Listen, I love silly voices,” Ross said, looking at his watch and standing up to leave. “Will you promise me something?” he asked.
“What?”
“It’s already late, so don’t stay up half the night reading, okay? It can wait. And you look tired.”
“Thanks,” said Petra, frowning at him. Mind you, she was tired.
Maybe it was a little bit nice that he had cared enough to notice.
Locking the door behind him, tiredness totally forgotten, Petra raced back up the stairs to the flat and—with deliberate control—made
herself brew cocoa and put her pajamas on before allowing herself even a peek at the contents of the brown folder.
“‘Don’t stay up half the night reading’?” she repeated aloud, as she propped herself up comfortably in bed and slid out a
slim sheaf of printed text. “Ha! In your dreams,” she told Ross in his absence.
Of course, the writing was beautiful.
And the premise was compelling too: A retelling of The Tempest from Caliban’s perspective. From the very first line, Petra was lost to herself. She was immersed in a way that had been
eluding her for at least the last two increasingly difficult years. The only break in her compulsion to keep devouring the
words on the page was when a particularly exquisite turn of phrase would cause her eyes to mist with tears. Blinking them
away impatiently, Petra read on, but this—just the opening fifty pages or so—was all too brief.
She was left jolting back to reality as she shuffled the papers tidily together. It was nearly one o’clock in the morning.
She stared, unseeing, at the indigo sky beyond the window, trying desperately to draw the language around her shoulders like
a cloak rather than return to cold gray reality. Her mug of cocoa sat cool and untouched beside her with a layer of puckered
skin on its surface. But what a ride! She, Petra, had been the first person to read those words, the first person to share
Ross’s ideas, expressed with such sparkling language, since the world had read his first book. And now it was just her and
Ross together in the universe. Joined. It felt more intimate than—well—intimacy.
Her phone pinged, and she scrambled to pick it up off the floor where it was recharging. Clearly, she was not the only one
still awake.
Walk up to the bench with me tomorrow?
I’ll be there, she typed, hesitated, inserted a heart emoji, then pressed send.
There was a pause of several minutes.
Did you hate it? Yes or no?
Only Shakespeare’s words would do, thought Petra. “In dreaming, the clouds methought would open and show riches, ready to drop upon me, that when I waked I cried to dream
again,” she typed before pressing send.
And then, Don’t leave me hanging, GIVE ME MORE!
Petra put down her phone and curled back up in bed, her head swirling with the beautiful, sorrowful images of longing and
loneliness on the “island of strange noises” Ross had conjured.
Within minutes, she slept. And poor, oppressed, savage, beleaguered Caliban haunted her dreams.