Dark Clouds on the Mountain by John Tully
Author:John Tully [Tully, John]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Fiction
ISBN: 9781877006197
Publisher: Port Campbell Press
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It was all his wife's fault for insisting that he went to the Jew tailor. Quality is quality, she'd argued. Gave him a funny look when he went on about Jewboys too. Why would anyone want a cheap suit from Glazer and Barker when they could get one properly cut by a Continental craftsman right here in Hobart? And he had to agree that she had a point. The Jews had always been the best tailors and so he had driven down the hill to Moonah, kangaroo-hopping over the lights and stalling several times. He had had to get out and threaten a man who honked his horn at him all the time. It wasn't as if he had to be friends with the Jew. It was business and that was all the Jews were ever interested in, wasn't it? A Jew had made a suit especially for him once, out of the finest material you could get. If this Jew now was half as good as that one, he would have a suit that would do his granddaughter proud at her wedding. Bloody oath.
So he'd thought at the time, but now look at the trouble he was in if they ever found him. The Jew worked in a little yellow-brick shop on the Main Road. He must have driven past a thousand times and never really noticed it. He'd pushed open the door and banged the little bell that sat on the counter. Walking in off the street, it had been like going back forty years. Nothing had changed in that shop since the war. There was an old airline calendar on the wall, open at August 1951, but all yellowed and frayed with age. Even the air smelled old, though it wasn't a bad smell from all the cloth. The Jew had come out from behind a screen, peering at him over the tops of his silver spectacles, his brown eyes magnified by the lenses, his hair in wild white disorder, a soft tape measure hanging round his neck. He was carrying a pair of scissors. Christ, the Jew looked so much like a magician that he had to stop himself from making the sign of the cross.
'Yes, what can I do for you?' the Jew had asked, his voice gentle and courteous, his intelligent brown eyes taking in his visitor, his white hair piled up and falling over his ears. He spoke English with an accent. Yiddish inflexions, just like he used to hear back in the Old Country. He'd told the Jew that he wanted a suit for his granddaughter's wedding. Not cheap rubbish like the stuff made in China for Glazer and Barker's, but a proper blue suit the way they used to make them. The Jew had assured him that he never made cheap rubbish, but that he'd have to pay for quality. He didn't mind paying. He knew that you had to if you wanted things that would last. The Jew would extract
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