Hot Stew by Fiona Mozley (most interesting books to read .TXT) 📕

vomited until she could only retch. She sweated and shook and turned off all the lights she could find. She couldn’t stand the brightness. She couldn’t stand to catch her reflection in the mirror, or in the aluminium of the fridge or the glass of the oven door, or in the bright water of the swimming pool or the concave in the back of spoons, convex in the stainless-steel sink.

After the drugs left her system she slept, for what felt like days, weeks. She tucked herself up, wrapping herself in all the blankets she could find, then piling sheets from the linen cupboard on top. She cocooned herself.

She didn’t put her old clothes back on, but left them by the pool. She found a toweled dressing gown in the cupboard by the sauna and wore that along with a pair of slippers. She moped around the complex like this. If there had been anyone else there to see her they might have thought her a customer at an upmarket spa.

She worked out how to use the sauna, and sat in the warm cubicle and picked dead skin from the soles of her feet and scraped dirt from her pores before coming out, rinsing off, drying herself and coating her body with shea butter from a tub she found in a cupboard and initially mistook for food. She did this every day. She used tubs of the stuff. Her skin began to heal. She used to have cuts, sores, bruises, but these began to recede until all that could be seen was a smattering of scars.

She started to turn the lights back on, using the dimmer switch to illuminate and darken the rooms, admiring the fresh tone and texture of her skin in different gradients of light. She began to enjoy looking down at her own arms and legs and hands and feet and watching as the flesh and muscle beneath the skin began to return. This new flesh. She pressed her fingers into it and watched it recess then bounce up and back into place. Her skin didn’t do this before. Before, when she pinched, it stayed in position like whipped egg whites.

In one room, there was a small cinema with folding red theater chairs. She sat in the dark and watched moving images projected onto a screen. She watched for so long, the faces and stories swirled with her own memories and became indistinguishable one from the other. Was she Cheryl Lavery or Debbie McGee? Or Scarlett O’Hara or Vivien Leigh? In another room, there was a bowling alley. The lanes were pristine, and finely polished. There were no scuff marks or chips in the wood laminate. Many of the balls had not been taken out of the cardboard boxes in which they had arrived, so sat like ballast in the hull of a ship, as if to hold the building in place. She pulled balls from their boxes and threw them down the lanes at skittles. She practiced and practiced. She perfected her technique. She found locked doors and searched for the keys, and when she couldn’t find the keys she picked the locks with a bent paperclip. In one of the locked rooms, she found expensive fitness equipment, including dumbbells and rowing machines and yoga mats. She lifted the dumbbells and had a go on the rowing machine, and contorted her body into yoga postures she found outlined in a book. In another room, she found boxes of foreign currency and, behind the boxes, bars of gold bullion from floor to ceiling. She took these from their shelves, held them in her hands, gazed at them then replaced them carefully and closed the door. There was a library. She read novels, and travel books, and books about history, and self-help books. She learned how to motivate herself. She learned about being a productive member of society. She learned how to be happy.

She began to count everything. Measure everything. She counted the number of books she read, and how quickly she read them. She compared the number of pages, the number of words on each page, the number of letters in each word. She counted the films she watched, and everything within them. How many times does that character say “yes”? How many times does this character say “no”? She counted the number of lengths she swam and the speed with which she swam them. She counted what she ate, not just the packets, but the individual crisps, peanuts, noodles. She wrote all the numbers down in a little book and carried it with her wherever she went, as if this collection of numbers held something of value.

She has now been in the basement for six months. The supplies are running low. She has emptied the cupboards and the fridge and the storeroom filled with boxes she discovered in her fourth week. The boxes are mostly gone, and Cheryl is getting tired of caviar and stuffed olives. She has read all the books and out-of-date periodicals and she has watched all the films. She has swum 8,266 lengths of the pool. She has used up the soap and shampoo in the pool-side shower. She has tired of the jacuzzi.

The tropical plants in the pool room have little labels stuck into the soil, announcing their Latin names. She has learned all of these and has also given the plants pet names of her own. Besides her, the plants are the only living creatures in the basement, unless you count bacteria or the mold on blue cheese (which she doesn’t). She has paced, and picked her nose, and masturbated. She has slept in a bed with a duvet and pillows, and soft linen sheets. She is fit and healthy. Her diet in this bunker, though strange, has been more nutritious than ever in her life before. She has exercised extensively every day. She has massaged expensive moisturizer into her skin. It is no longer dry, brittle, cracked, bruised. It is