My Absolute Darling: The Sunday Times bestseller. Gabriel Tallent
lays the rabbit across the dirt and opens the van’s rusted door and finds it stuffed with Oriental rugs. She drags out a rug, unrolls it, and finds nothing but sow bugs and wolf spiders. She walks to the front of the van. She opens the passenger-side door and sits inside, looks carefully around the front of the van. There is a strange, intermittent squeaking. It sounds like a loose spring in the upholstery, but it isn’t that. She opens the glove box and finds decaying maps and something long rotten. She leans down and walks her fingers along the footwell where the moldy upholstery has wrinkled up from the frame. She draws her grandpa’s bowie knife, cuts through the carpet, and pulls it aside. There are three pink newborn mice, the size of her fingertips, laid up along a mounded fold in the carpet, eyes closed, paws folded in small fists, squeaking furiously. Turtle lays the carpet back over the mice.
She climbs out of the bus and walks to where the rabbit lays on the dirt. She collars its feet, slits it from anus to throat, pulls its fur off like a bloody sock, and pitches the pelt into the brush. She scoops out the guts and pitches those after the pelt. Then she makes a fire of dry grass and dead wood, skewers the rabbit, and roasts it over the fire, looking by turns at the fire and out at the valley.
A mouse comes out from the undercarriage of the VW and she watches it wander about. It clambers awkwardly up a shoot of grass to get at the seeds in their papery chaff, bowing the sprig over. It extends its muzzle, sniffing and finally opening its mouth to show the chisel of its teeth. Its ears are small and round and the sun shows pink through them with just a single, snaky pink vein at the center of each ear, catching the light.
Turtle takes the rabbit down from the skewer and the mouse bolts, feinting right and then changing directions in a desperate bid for a nearby rock. But whatever hiding place it expects isn’t there, and it performs a panicked circuit of the rock. In a last-ditch effort, the mouse squashes itself up against the rock and waits, panting. Turtle prizes ribs off the rabbit’s spine and chews the flesh from them, letting the juice run down her scabby fingers. In time, the mouse comes back and wanders the clay promontory, lifting one tiny hand to lean on this or that stalk of grass, flouncing its whiskers when it sniffs. Turtle finishes the carcass and pitches it over the ledge into the trees below. Her fire smolders. She sits, hands folded, watching.
She needs to get up and go home. She knows it, but she just doesn’t go. She wants to wait out here, on this clay promontory above the river valley, and wants to watch the day go by. She needs time to sit and go through her thoughts like going through a colander of snow peas. It’s not like Martin does, when he paces thinking and thinking and sometimes gesturing to himself as he tries to think out something difficult. The day warms, turns to late afternoon, and still Turtle does not go, does not move.
Then she sees a spider. It is the silvery color of sun-bleached driftwood. It sits sullen at the edge of its hole, eyes hidden behind a mess of hairy legs. The legs unfold and reach carefully out of the cave like ghastly, creeping fingers. She can see no eyes and no face, only the clutch of fingers. It has a speculative creep. The mouse crouches several feet away, hunched over another seedpod, its potbelly pooched up between its legs. When it is done with its seed, it looks down and gives the short hairs on its pink belly a hard look, then riffles through them with its fingers in a sudden, urgent little search, and dives its muzzle into its belly and chews intently for a moment.
The spider moves carefully. Stricken, Turtle watches it circle the tuft of grass, drawing closer. She hears then a noise from down the road—someone walking along the roadbed, and she thinks wildly of Martin. It is more than possible that he has managed to follow her. He has done it before. It is even likely. She rises slowly, silently, drawing the pistol from its holster and slivering back the slide to see the bright brass in the chamber, her every movement swift and quiet, but then she stops to watch. The spider emerges behind the mouse and crosses the last six inches and then rears and sinks two black hooks down into the mouse’s shoulder. The mouse jerks spasmodically, one hind leg pedaling through the air. She hears more footsteps, but Turtle is captivated, watching the spider drag the mouse backward to the burrow, where it lodges crosswise against the silky-webbed sides. Knuckles in her mouth, Turtle watches the spider come half out again, fangs buried in the mouse’s back. It turns the mouse with deft legs and then pulls the mouse down into the dark, the pink tail twitching.
She chews her fingers in anguish. The footsteps draw closer, and Turtle ducks into the woods, lies down behind a log. A slender, black-haired boy comes down the road, her age or a little older, fifteen or sixteen, not watching his feet, wearing a backpack and board shorts, an old T-shirt with a single candle and a twist of barbwire around it, some word she doesn’t know. He stands, surveying the clay promontory, chewing on the water reservoir’s bite valve. He isn’t much experienced. The board shorts are a bad idea. His trail-running shoes are unscuffed, the backpack new. He doesn’t know what he’s looking at or what he’s looking for. His gaze just wanders. He seems delighted.
Another boy comes down the road behind him, this one with an old leather-and-Cordura backpack molding apart, a huge blue tarp rolled up and bungee-corded to the side. This new boy says, “Dude! Dude! Check it out! A van!” He’s holding a spray can of Easy Cheese and piling it onto a Butterfinger. She places her front sight on the can. “Dude, Jacob!” he says to the black-haired boy. “Dude, Jacob! You want to sleep in that sick, righteous-looking van?” He stuffs the Butterfinger into his mouth and chews. His grin is so big that his jaw stands out and shows his chocolate-stained teeth. He’s having trouble eating the bar all at once and it slips partially out of his mouth, so he pushes it back in with a forefinger. Turtle could shoot the can right out of his hand.
Jacob smiles and squats down at the coals of Turtle’s fire, raking through it with a stick. She’s seen both boys before, last year when they were eighth graders and she was a seventh grader. The candy-eating boy is Brett. They must be high school freshmen now, and she doesn’t know how they’ve gotten here, but they must be a long ways lost. She wonders what the black-haired one is thinking. He is hurtful to look at, his face beautiful and unguarded. They must be on some kind of weekend adventure. Their parents dropped them off, they were going to spend one night out here and walk out the next day, something like that. Jacob sets his backpack down and eases a map from the mesh access pocket. He smooths it flat and says, “Well.”
“This cheese,” Brett says, holding up the cheese can, Turtle placing the front sight perfectly on it, “is sick. I mean, fucking dank, is all.” He props his backpack against one of the VW’s wheels and lies down, pillowing his head against it, jetting Easy Cheese into his open mouth from the can. “I know you don’t believe, but truth, I mean truth.”
Jacob, looking by turns at the map and at the valley, says, “Man, we suck at this.”
Brett says, “Just because it’s in a can doesn’t mean it’s not ‘real’ cheese, you know?”
“We are extremely, I mean extremely—I don’t want to say ‘lost,’ but I am not entirely sure of where we might actually be.”
“You’re cheese-prejudiced, is what you are.”
Jacob lies back on the rug that Turtle unrolled hours ago. He says, “Our powers of navigation astound.” He opens his backpack and pulls out a wedge of Jarlsberg and a loaf of focaccia still in its Tote Fête bakery bag. He and Brett pass these items back and forth, lying propped up on their packs, stretched at length on the Oriental rug with small powdery gray moths struggling up from the nap. They take bites directly from the wedge of cheese.
“Let’s camp here.”
“There’s no water.”
“I wish there was a girl here,” Brett says wonderingly, looking up at the sky. “We could woo her with our powers of navigation.”
“If she were blind and had no sense of direction.”
“That’s sick,” Brett says, “sick, deceiving a blind girl like that.”
“I’d date a blind girl,” Jacob says. “Though, not just because she was blind. What I mean is—I don’t think it’d matter.”
“I’d