: William Friend
: Black Mamba
: Atlantic Books
: 9781838956578
: 1
: CHF 7.60
:
: Erzählende Literatur
: English
: 320
: Wasserzeichen
: PC/MAC/eReader/Tablet
: ePUB
'Great fun... the suspense slips its slow coils around you' Daily Mail Daddy, there's a man in our room... This is the chilling announcement Alfie hears one night, when he wakes in his quiet, suburban house to find his twin daughters at the foot of his bed. It's been nine months since Pippa - their mother - suddenly died and they've been unsettled ever since, so Alfie assumes they've probably had a nightmare. Still, he goes to check to reassure the girls. As expected he finds no man, but in the following days the girls begin to refer to someone called Black Mamba. What seemingly begins as an imaginary friend quickly develops into something darker, more obsessive, potentially violent. Alfie finds himself struggling to cope, and so he turns to Julia - Pippa's twin and a psychotherapist - for help. But as Black Mamba's coils tighten around the girls, Alfie and Julia must contend with their own unspoken sense of loss, their unacknowledged attraction to one another, and the true character of the presence poisoning the twins' minds... A darkling tale of tragedy, hauntings and sexual desire, Black Mamba is a novel of a father's love for his struggling daughters, and a widower's growing love for a woman after his wife's death. With smart, gothicky touches and a large and generous challenge to our assumptions of what and who constitutes a modern family, it explores both the limits we'll go to for our children and the sunken taboos of grief - of how erotics can still exist, and can even be life giving, after suffering loss.

William Friend studied English, French and Italian at university. He lives in Hertfordshire with his partner. Black Mamba is his first novel.

One


Alfie


This morning, I heard the name Black Mamba for the first time, and it made me remember some dreams. Not mine; dreams that my daughters had. Visions that splintered their sleep.

It began nine months after the accident. Every night, during the devil’s hour, I’d wake to find the twins standing motionless at the foot of my bed, their faces veiled by the dark.

Daddy, there’s a man in our room.

Those words became familiar, like a choral refrain, and could stir my body whilst my mind, or the better part of it, remained asleep. I’d shift beneath the cold, stiff sheets, flatten my nose against the pillow and sigh.No there isn’t, I’d say. But my arm, half dead with sleep, would lift the duvet all the same and let the girls clamber in, to nestle in the cleft where their mum had once slept.

Naturally, the first night was different. On the first night, the twins’ mere presence at my bedside, sudden and unexpected, sent a shot of adrenaline through me.

‘Daddy, there’s a man in our room.’

The sentence jerked me upright, like the tug of a noose and the floor falling through beneath my feet.

‘A man?’ I said.

‘A man.’

And the girls stood so still, and their voices were so flat and toneless and dead that I could scarcely breathe; yet somehow I gathered the strength to tiptoe out of my room and towards theirs.

‘Stay here,’ I whispered, but they wouldn’t let me leave them, so we shuffled together down the staircase, their tiny hands squeezing mine as we listened. And it was only the silence – the pure, solid hush of night – that began, finally, to calm me. Blood flowed back to my face and neck, and I started to feel like an adult again. Like a father.

‘Are you sure you weren’t dreaming?’

‘It wasn’t a dream. It was real. He was there.’

Into their room we went, and the snap of the electric light instantly illuminated everything, revealing nothing, no one. I flung open the wardrobe doors; lifted the duvet, with its chalk-blue swirls, to search beneath the