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Andrews UK - Nic Penrake

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159 pages

English

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The same day as suicide bombers shock London, dentist Anthony Price is involved in an accident at a swimming pool that shatters the routine of his existence. Pushed off the top dividing board by an unruly adolescent, he falls on a beautiful Thai girl in the water below, cracking one of her front teeth. In the aftermath, Price gets to know the girl, first as his patient called Sisira, then intimately as an escort called Sonia. Blinded by desire for her, he fails to see the trap he is walking into and falls headlong into a nightmarish world of blackmail and murder from which he may never truly escape. Totally compelling and terrifyingly convincing, Sisi & Sonia is the story of how an ordinary man can go to extraordinary lengths to win the heart of a woman who has lost all faith in men.

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Erotic literature

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Publié par	Andrews UK
Date de parution	22 juillet 2010
Nombre de lectures	1
EAN13	9781849891721
Langue	English
Poids de l'ouvrage	2 Mo

Informations légales : prix de location à la page 0,0300€. Cette information est donnée uniquement à titre indicatif conformément à la législation en vigueur.

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Title Page
SISI AND SONIA
By
Nic Penrake
Publisher Information
Sisi & Sonia published in 2010 by
Andrews UK Limited
www.andrewsuk.com
This book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, resold, hired out or otherwise circulated without the publisher’s prior written consent in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published, and without a similar condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.
The characters and situations in this book are entirely imaginary and bear no relation to any real person or actual happening.
Copyright © Nic Penrake
The right of Nic Penrake to be identified as author of this book has been asserted in accordance with section 77 and 78 of the Copyrights Designs and Patents Act 1988.

Chapter 1
Adrift in the waters of post-trauma, my daughters’ tendril-like hands sometimes touching me, their voices lapping in my ears, all I can really see in this leisure centre’s recreational area is that beautiful, lissom young Thai girl clinging to the side of the pool like a flower, trembling, broken by heavy rain. The blood red of her swimming costume seems to have been branded on my brain. Even though it wasn’t my fault that I knocked half her tooth out - it was a stupid accident - I feel pregnant with a sense of responsibility, pained that she’s gone already. I also got hurt. Everyone’s said I should go to the hospital to have some stitches put in the small gash above my left eyebrow. But I’ve also been asked to wait for the police just in case the accident was in part my fault. So, for the last twenty minutes, I’ve been sitting here on this plastic coloured chair amid excited kids and vending machines and smells of chlorine and take out food, gradually beginning to feel like a bag in Lost Property.
“Dad, you’re bleeding again!” my daughters are telling me, more alarmed than I am.
The plaster I was given has finally been breached. I look between my feet to see small drops of crimson rain down in slow motion. I take a tissue from my jacket pocket and press it to the trilling wound.
Michaela, 9, and Mia, 6, five minutes ago dancing in circles around me, their arms arcing, their bodies shaking with laughter as they collided with each other in that happy, lazy and gentle way young girls do, now plonk themselves down beside me - clamouring for information about blood and cuts.
“You need to go to hospital, Dad!”
“No, I’ll be fine.”
The girls sit beside me. Mia hugs me round the waist - only to get a whiff of vomit from the bag between my feet and recoil suddenly - “Ugh, disgusting!”
“What… where?” Michaela asks, forensically interested.
“I think it’s coming from the bag,” I tell her.
“ Disgusting ,” Mia repeats, waving her hands at the stink. “Is that when you were sick by the pool?”
I wish she wouldn’t shout for everyone else to hear - I’ve attracted enough disgusted looks from strangers already this morning.
“I think so, yeah. It’s mostly on the towel, which is in the bag.”
Mia backs away from the bag as though the vomity towel might jump out at her. She’s funny, so dramatic always. “Don’t worry, I’ll put it in the wash as soon as we get home.”
“When are we going home?” Mia asks with renewed emphasis.
“Soon.”
“Why were you sick?” Michaela asks in that dreamy way she has that suggests she processes all information in terms of other images, usually from movies and computer games.
“That man said you were pissed. What does ‘pissed’ mean, Dad?” Mia asks, ever the little perceptive one.
“Pissed means drunk. I wasn’t drunk, I had a concussion, and sometimes a concussion can make you look as if you’re drunk.”
“What’s a concussion?”
“When you bang your head and you’re knocked out, or you’re nearly knocked out. And sometimes that makes you feel sick…”
The truth is, I did wake with a fairly bad hangover that morning, but I’m not about to admit that to two young girls with flapping tongues - it’s hard enough to get their mother to give me the benefit of the doubt when the shit hits the fan and the girls are involved.
I’m about to enlighten them further on the subject of head injuries, when my mobile starts vibrating against my thigh and I motion to the girls hold that thought . The caller ID tells me it’s my brother and I feel immediately grateful for the timing of his call.
“Myles!” I say with the kind of unimpeachable spiritedness the British can muster so naturally in the midst of a crisis.
“Tony, are you alright?” His instant and deeply felt concern strikes me as eerily prescient, it’s as if he’d had a premonition days ago that I might be in some kind of danger.
“Er, no actually, my head’s killing me, I - ”
“Christ, were you hurt?”
“Yeah, I - yeah I was…. how did you know?”
“It’s been all over the news.”
“The news?” Suddenly my heart starts galloping all over again. I look about me half expecting to see a gaggle of journalists with cameras arguing with security at the entrance of the leisure centre. But no one’s there, just this steady on/off stream of scruffy looking parents and hyper kids bouncing in and out on their way to changing rooms, reception or pool gallery.
“Yeah, are you OK?”
“No, I’m not, I - I think I got a c-concussion, uh...” I just stammered, I never stammer, this is a little worrying, but I plough on. “ - There’s a girl with her tooth knocked out - ”
“Concussion?”
“Yeah, cut my head open, smashed my knee... It’s not too bad, but there’s another kid also hurt - he’s been wheeled off to hospital - and I think the people here think it’s all my fault, I don’t know, I’m waiting for the police to get here.”
“Shit, why would they think it’s your fault?”
“Myles, how did you know I’d been hurt anyway? I didn’t call you, did I? I feel a bit dazed…”
“I just told you, it’s on the news.”
“Really?”
“Yes.”
His slightly reproachful tone makes me prickle with confusion. My head’s beginning to throb with a fresh surge of anxiety, exhausted adrenals are squirting what little they have left - and, now I realise, I’m shaking. I remove the tissue I’ve been pressing to my cut - a sopping wad of bright red that’s made me a little Japanese flag. Another little red bomb explodes on the floor. I press the tissue back, even though it’s probably lost its absorbency.
“But it wasn’t that big a deal. I mean, I don’t think anyone got seriously hurt - ”
“Well, Tony, over 30 people are dead and they expect a lot more. I’d say that’s a pretty big deal.”
“Myles, what’re you talking about? No one died.”
“Tone, you’ve got a TV at your dental practice, don’t you?”
“Yeah, but I’m not there - ”
“Well, a radio or something?”
“Myles, what’s up?”
“Find a TV, turn it on. There’ve been 3 or 4 simultaneous terrorist attacks on the tube and on a bus. Maybe you should be in hospital if you can’t remember what happened to you.”
“Myles, there were no bombs. I’m at a swimming pool.”
Hanging up, I now have an explanation as to why the police are taking so long: they’ve got more important things to be doing. It’s probably a fair guess they’ll never materialise.
“ Daaad , when’re we going home?” Mia moans again.
I reach for her hand.
“Right now, sweetheart,” and so we just walked out of there. And in spite of all the earlier uproar and panic no one seemed to take the blindest bit of notice.
Most life-changing accidents that befall us fill our mouths with spiky ‘if’s, like fish bones we can’t spit out quick enough - If only I hadn’t gone on that day, if only I’d stayed at home, if only I hadn’t looked into her eyes … For most of you reading this, July 7 2005 brings back one memory - the London bombings. And for me, yes of course it’s that, too. But even as I soaked up the repeated video playback of victims’ talking of what they’d experienced, shots of the mutilated bus and street debris - all of it a thickening collage of fear and speculation that overlapped itself into slowly-gestating panic - I was still caught up in the experience of some other random collision of energies that had happened to me around the same time, in the same city.
It’s an odd feeling to be involved in a public accident at the same time as a bigger public outrage, somewhere else in the same city. I was secretly excited by the coincidence, inclined to believe it might even ‘mean’ something, I could have believed I’d tapped into a major vibration of gathering randomness, that the events were trying to tell me something about my own destiny. Yes, I sound overblown perhaps, but those were the emotions that day. And although I was transported from my own immediate preoccupations to a broader canvas of concern, I felt undeserving of a sympathetic ear. And so I withdrew. Ironically, it would be in part the post 7/7 swell of compassion that would sweep me, months later, into my own nightmare of savage violence and loss. But I’m running ahead of myself. I should return to the pool - which gave birth to this story.
***
I’d been startled awake that morning by a vibration against my thigh. I was lying on my back in my dentist chair like a space traveller. I’d meant to get out of the chair and crash on the sofa in reception, but I’d been too wazzed to make it that far. I’d opened my eyes half expecting to see that I’d fallen asleep on the dodgy drill head. It was my phone, of course. The single buzz told me it was a text message. I lay there a moment longer, gazing at the crowd of happy-go-lucky cartoon characters on the poster pinned to the ceiling above my head and imagined pinning something obscene up there in its place. And just for a second or two I felt bereft of any childish mischief in my life.
A little letter icon and my wife’s name, SYLVIA, soon wiped the