‘They’re making such a fuss of him. What a dork.’ ‘Stop being horrible,’ said Ali. ‘Poor guy. I bet it hurt.’ After that they worked silently, thinking about the story they would have to tell that night, but Jo was starting to feel a weight of history stir and wriggle from the layers below her as if all the particles, sifted and compressed by time, had stories of their own requiring her to listen. The three of them had been first to the trench when he fell out of the sky and she had bent over him, seeing he wasn’t breathing and looking at his staring eyes, terrified that he might indeed be dead. Then she saw him fighting for breath and, as Dozer pushed them out of the way, feared he might have broken his back. As they walked away she kept looking back to try to see his face, because it hadn’t lodged in her memory and Gally wanted to know. Gally wanted to know? She almost laughed at herself for thinking that way but that was the way it had seemed for just a moment. She had seen so many faces when she looked at his.
What do You think about The Lives She Left Behind?
