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The Wonder House
Extract - Part 1
Prologue
Before the insurgency – Kashmir, North India, September 1975.
It broke down into a series of single images, postcards to keep, like the ones lined up at the stalls along the boulevard by the lake: single focus, captured and stored. There were his upper fingers where his hand pressed into the bark beside her head, a hand she had seen all her life without noticing the length of its joints from knuckle to nail. His face blocked out the light, dark in front of the sun. She could feel his breath but she could not separate out his features on their unlit plain. There was movement all around them: the slow irritation of his mule’s tail, the way her harness shifted as she did, layers of leaves above them, trapping and releasing the light that his face had blocked out, the way the earth breathed in the heat, and how it shifted as she tried to be still.
Everything peripheral withdrew as his face moved to rest against the side of hers. He settled against the length of her body, the buttress of his hip tucking into the space below her ribcage.
The hands that she had seen scooping and wrapping the food that she had cooked, fingers she had watched flicking star anise out of her pilau as the grains stuck to his skin, moved across her. Her back slid down the tree, bark rucking up her thin cotton tunic until she was crouched at its trunk. She tasted the sweat at the sides of his mouth as his head blocked the light again.
She did not close her eyes.
The mule watched, turned towards them, part of their intersection. She threw up her head as the girl shouted out.
This pain was the only thing she had to give him and it snapped through both of them. They lay in silence under the great cedar tree, clinging in the subsidence.
The tree had been marked for timber. The boy had brought her to see it before it was felled. That was his job.
Prologue Continued >
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