Montpelier Parade by Karl Geary

Author:Karl Geary [Geary, Karl]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Penguin Random House UK

20

In the cold room at the back of the butcher shop, the split beef carcasses swung on old hooks. Sometimes when no one could see, you punched the soft bit under the ribs, your hand bloodied with wet slaps, but it was not your blood, and afterwards you could just wash it off.

Vera wanted to die, but if you could bring her here, into the cold room with the cold swinging dead things that meant nothing and could be punched and eaten and their blood washed away without a second thought, then she would see what dead was and not want it. You were the hero in your dream of saving her, even with everything you didn’t know about her.

You had thought often of saving your mother, but saw how you had given up being her hero.

‘Sonny, you’ll be late now, get up,’ your mother called from the bottom of the stairs. You lay still, a blanket wrapped tight around you, eyes open. The curtains were drawn but were too thin to stop the light passing through. Your clothes were in a heap on the floor beside you; last night you had discarded them as if you would never need them again. You swung your legs out from the lower bunk bed and the cold air found you. When you pushed into your jeans they felt damp, and your jumper held old sweat and tobacco.

‘I’m next,’ says a brother, standing outside the locked bathroom door. So you went downstairs needing a piss. Your father sat at the kitchen table, a mostly eaten bowl of cornflakes in front of him with a few hardened flakes around the rim and a small bit of milk that he couldn’t get to with the spoon. He smeared a slice of white bread with butter and dipped his cornflake spoon into the packet of sugar; white granules danced across the table as he spilt the sugar over the bread, folding it in two before he started roughly chewing. Your mother stood at the sink, and through her eyes you felt disgust.

‘Where are your brothers?’ she says and walked past you, her voice calling at the base of the stairs. But you knew they were hiding up there until he was finished. Your mother knew it, and surely he must’ve known it too.

You put the kettle on and stood with your hand on the steel draining board, feeling the vibrations of the slow boiling. Through the window, the small neglected back garden moved patiently through spring; the grass had risen and the old rockery in front of the big wall was overgrown. There was a laburnum tree that used to grow in the middle of the garden, and by this late in the season you’d expect to see the first scatter of buds that would become a million yellow blossoms. Your mother had grown afraid of it, saying it was too big, its roots would grow under the house and upend the foundation. You had felt

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.