The Dead Path

The Dead Path

Snow fell.

It drifted down slow as morning mist, settling white on brown, white on silver, white on white. It fell so thickly that Nicholas could see no more than a meter or so ahead. His hair, normally the color of dry grass, was white with it. His hands on his hips, flecked coral, blood red, and indigo, grew steadily paler as he stood in the steady downward wash of white. His eyes, the darkest part of him, were all that moved as he watched the figure above him. A ghost, swaying its arms to the milky sky, waving. Or a summoning angel. A spectral thing, unmindful of him.

He stared a long moment, then pulled off his earmuffs.

The snow was driven by the roar of an orbital sander. The machine's electric hornet buzz was so amplified by the soundbox of the ceiling   that it seemed some lunatic was on the roof tumbling an endless stream of rocks down the tiles. A stepladder was perched half-in and half-out of the bath, and atop it Cate strained upward as she sanded around the vent in the bathroom ceiling. Plaster dust was everywhere, making the small room a blizzard world of indeterminable size.

She attacked the ceiling in broad strokes that belied her size,  swooping mightily over the plaster filler like a baker spreading dough or a shipwright planning planks. He watched the way her arm muscles moved under their geisha patina, the way her calves stretched.

It was a gloomy Saturday afternoon. While Cate prepped the bathroom, Nicholas had been chiseling up tiles in the minuscule laundry. Because they worked in separate rooms, it was all the more enjoyable to come together, picking their ways through the battlefield of paint cans, balled drop sheets, takeaway curry containers holding limey water and soaking brushes, to find some clean little beachhead in the madness, wipe the dust off each other, kiss, and encourage themselves that the   renovations would indeed end and this would soon-God, please, soon!-be the sexiest little flat in Ealing.

The dumb sky outside grumbled darkly, making the small bathroom in false winter seem even cheerier.

A tearing sound, and Cate switched off the sander.

"You effing . . . shit." Her lips pursed tight, as if fighting to dam a wild ocean of obscenities.

Nicholas tutted. "The language. It never fails to shock me."

Excerpted from The Dead Path by Stephen M. Irwin Copyright © 2010 by Stephen M. Irwin. Excerpted by permission of Doubleday, a division of Random House, Inc. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.