Half Moon Street by Alex Reeve

Author:Alex Reeve
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781631941887
Publisher: Felony & Mayhem Press
Published: 2019-04-25T16:00:00+00:00

I had grown accustomed to not seeing Jane or thinking about her from day to day or week to week, but once upon a time I’d been more familiar with her voice than my own, and to know that it was lost to me, to know for certain, was hard to bear.

I felt empty, as if I were craving food but unable to tolerate it. After a day, my craving turned to resentment and then to anger. I’d been her ally when she’d confided how much she loathed our father and despised his endless pedagogy; everything we saw and every place we visited turned into a lesson complete with Bible quotes and a test, as though our lives were a metaphor for his Protestant religion rather than the other way round. But the truth was clear now. What went bone-deep for me was just the ink on her fingers, easily washed off.

In the end, she’d sided with him.

But still, when I lay on my bed unable to sleep, I couldn’t help but remember those summers in the vicarage, dancing around the garden flapping our arms, blessing the rhododendrons and peonies and the baby thrushes in our father’s nesting boxes. We’d held them in our hands and watched their tiny, pink beaks open and close. It was as if we’d given them life.

I took to hanging around the pharmacy before I left for the hospital. Business was, as Alfie called it, slack, meaning slack like a rope that would soon pull tight, but there wasn’t so much as a twitch as far as I could see. By late on Friday afternoon I’d only served three customers: an elderly woman buying arsenic for the rats, a tanner who bought the last box of salt and Miss Horner from the brewery, who came in for some carbolic after a drayman dropped a barrel on his foot and split the skin, she said, from small to big toe.

Meanwhile, Alfie was learning how to use his new contraption. It was a hideous thing—a chair, a footpump and various attached apparatus that he’d installed right in the centre of the shop—which was far too small for such a beast to be overlooked. He was practising his new craft on a pickled pig’s head. It was awful; the stink of pork and vinegar, the squeak of the pedal, the whirring of the gears and, worst of all, the insistent grinding of the drill on tooth enamel.

‘Dentistry is just engineering,’ he explained, exchanging the drill for a pair of pliers. ‘The machine does all the work. You just have to be careful not to slip and go into the soft parts of the mouth.’

He was hoping his new venture would attract more wealthy patrons to the pharmacy. I feared it would have the opposite effect, and that any customer seeking medicines would be discouraged by the sight of a man torturing a pig’s head clamped to a chair.

I was about to get my coat and go to work when the bell on the door rang.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.