Читать книгу Crocodile Tears онлайн

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She’s in a hurry but she doesn’t rush, she doesn’t race down the stairs but takes them one step at a time, planting first one foot and then the other, gripping the banister firmly, tightly even.

No doubt she is thinking, as always, that her extra weight could cause her to trip or to lose her balance, to tumble and fall, rolling clumsily from floor to floor until she reaches the bottom. Perhaps she thinks that if she trips then her body will plummet, bouncing off the worn marble steps, her head smashing against the edges and corners of the bronze-and wrought-iron banister. Perhaps she even imagines the sound of soft flabby flesh hitting the floor, the sound a veal cutlet 32makes when hammered with a tenderizer. Maybe she sees her wrecked and bleeding body, finally still, forever still down there, in the hallway, at the end of its descent. Stair after stair, on her slow march she imagines curious passers-by peering through the glass of the entrance hall, their noses pressed against it for a better view of the spectacle, the red trail of blood on the marble, because people are morbid and nothing attracts an audience quite like disease or pain or death. Or sex.