I stopped and stood in the mouth of the cave and
listened as hard as I could, but my father wasn't speaking. And the
smell was getting to me.
#
She got him dressed and she fed him sips of water and she got him
standing and walked him in circles around the little paddock he'd
collapsed in.
"I need to get Georgie out of the car," he said. "I'm going to leave him
in the cave. It's right."
She bit her lip and nodded slowly. "I can help you with that," she said.
"I don't need help," he said lamely.
"I didn't say you did, but I can help anyway."
They walked down slowly, him leaning on her arm like an old man, steps
faltering in the scree on the slope. They came to the road and stood
before the trunk as the cars whizzed past them. He opened the trunk and
looked down.
The journey hadn't been good to Gregg. He'd come undone from his winding
sheet and lay face down, neck stiff, his nose mashed against the floor
of the trunk. His skin had started to flake off, leaving a kind of scale
or dandruff on the flat industrial upholstery inside the trunk.
Alan gingerly tugged loose the sheet and began, awkwardly, to wrap it
around his brother, ignoring the grit of shed skin and hair that clung
to his fingers.
Mimi shook him by the shoulder hard, and he realized she'd been shaking
him for some time. "You can't do that here," she said.
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