Elizabeth Day - Scissors, Paper, Stone

Scissors, Paper, Stone

Elizabeth Day

4th Estate

An imprint of HarperCollins Publishers 1 London Bridge Street London SE1 9GF

www.4thEstate.co.uk

First published in Great Britain by Bloomsbury Publishing Plc in 2011

This eBook edition published by 4th Estate in 2017

Copyright © Elizabeth Day, 2011

Elizabeth Day asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

This novel is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities is entirely coincidental.

All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins

Source ISBN: 9780008221775

Ebook Edition © May 2017 ISBN: 9780008221782

Version: 2018-03-06

Praise for Scissors, Paper, Stone

‘Elizabeth Day’s observations of a certain sort of middle-class life […] are altogether brilliant … Moreover, the self-restraint of the plot is as impressive as that of the characterisation: when the cause of the family’s unhappiness is finally revealed, it is all the more unpleasant for being so utterly unexpected’ Spectator

‘[A] tense, sensitive exploration of a mother and daughter's fractured relationship and the man between them’ Marie Claire

‘Deftly unpicks a daughter’s troubled relationship with her mother after her father has lapsed into a coma’ Observer

‘[Scissors, Paper, Stone] has the page-turning compulsion of a thriller combined with the horror of discovering exactly what happens when human behaviour skids from normal to disturbing’ Belfast Telegraph Morning

‘Rips along convincingly … Day reveals the horrible truth behind this ostensibly ordinary family. At this point Day's brilliance as a writer starts delivering a real punch … thoroughly believable’ New Zealand Herald

‘Clever and well-written’ Times Literary Supplement

‘Elizabeth Day has written an absorbing and moving novel in which she has managed to convey the chronic damage that a father, wife and daughter may do to one another. Her writing is both delicate and direct, not an easy combination to effect, but she has pulled it off’ Elizabeth Jane Howard

'A daring, absorbing and beautifully-written story of damage and betrayal, this is an exhilarating and deeply affecting first novel’ Jennie Rooney, author of Inside the Whale

To my parents,

for being nothing like Anne and Charles

Contents

Cover

Title Page

Copyright

Praise for Scissors, Paper, Stone

Dedication

Prologue

PART I

Anne

Anne; Charles

Charlotte

Anne

Anne; Charles

Charlotte

Anne; Charlotte

Anne; Charles

Charlotte

Charlotte

Janet; Anne

Charlotte

Anne; Charles

Charlotte

Anne; Charlotte

Anne; Charles

Charlotte

Anne

Anne; Charles

Charlotte

Anne

PART II

Charlotte

Charlotte

Anne

Charles

Janet

Janet; Anne; Charlotte

Janet

Charlotte

Epilogue

A Note on the Author

Keep Reading

About the Publisher

Prologue

At first he does not realise he is bleeding. He wakes in a state of numbness, with no memory of where he is. It takes him several minutes to notice the glutinous dark-red liquid but, even then, he cannot work out where it is coming from. It trickles past his nose with a slow insistence and gathers in a small pool at the tip of his finger. It smells of uncooked meat.

He can make no sense of his position. He appears to be lying on hard grey flagstones, his face parallel with the serrated metal surface of a manhole cover. His left cheek is pressed painfully against the pavement and he cannot open one eye. The other eye, sticky and blurred, is focusing on a blackened blob of chewing gum, trodden into the ground a few inches from his nose.

He rolls his eye around frantically in its socket, straining to see as much as possible. Out of one corner, he can make out the bridge of his nose. An arm is spread out underneath his head, disjointed and bent out of shape. He wonders briefly whose arm it is and then he works out with a jolt that it must be his and a sickness rises up inside him.

He finds that he cannot move. It is not that he feels any pain, simply that any physical exertion is impossible. Something is loose and rattling in his mouth. He presses at it with the tip of his swollen tongue and thinks it must be a tooth.

A voice that he does not recognise, male and throaty, is speaking. After a few seconds, he notices that the words make sense.

‘All right mate, all right, just keep still. The ambulance will be here soon.’

That is when he realises he must be bleeding. Instantly, he feels a desperate surge of white-hot panic. His one eye starts to weep, silently, and the tears drip down from the corner of his eyelid to the tip of his nose and on to the pavement, where they mix in with the blood, thinning it to a watery consistency. He tries to speak but no sound emerges. His mind is filling with infinite questions, each one expanding to fill the space like a sea anenome unfurling underwater.

What is happening?

Where am I?

What am I doing here?

He feels himself at the brink of something, as if he is about to fall a very long distance. He is overwhelmingly tired and his eyelid starts to droop, obscuring his field of vision even more. From the squinted sliver of sight that remains, he sees the rounded edge of a black leather boot. The boot is battered and laced and has a thick rubber sole and it is coming towards him and now it is treading into the redness that seems to be covering a larger area of pavement than before. As the boot moves away, he notices that it leaves an imprint on the ground, a stencilled trail of wet blood.

He can make out snippets of a conversation that is taking place above his head.

‘Yeah, he was knocked off his bike, poor sod.’

‘Christ. Was he wearing a helmet?’

‘Don’t think so. Driver didn’t even stop.’

‘Where’s the ambulance?’

‘On its way.’

His eyelid is pressing down, and despite telling himself that he must stay awake, that it is important to remain alert, he is powerless to stop it. Soon, he is enveloped by a throbbing darkness, a beating tide of black that crashes against the bones of his skull. He hears the sirens and, just before he allows himself to fall into nothingness, he has one startlingly clear vision of his daughter. She is twelve years old and lying in bed with the flu and he has made her buttered toast and she is too hot so she has drawn back the bedsheets.

The last thing he sees before his mind collapses is the precise curve of the pale flesh of her kneecap and he is saturated by love.

It was a curious thing, but when she was told that her husband was almost dead, her first thought was not for him but for the beef casserole. She had been in the process of boiling up a stock when the doorbell rang, tearing up parsley stalks and rummaging blindly in the cupboard for an elusive box of bay leaves. She answered the door while still wearing her apron and her hands were slightly damp as she unlocked the safety chain. A speck of indeterminate green foliage had attached itself to the cuff of her floral printed blouse. She was attempting to swat it away when she became aware of the uniformed officers on her doorstep.