Still by Adam Thorpe

Author:Adam Thorpe
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781446498194
Publisher: Random House

A MATCH FLARES.

Big deal. It’s George lighting the candles. It’s nobody’s birthday. Actually, today is my birthday, remember? Hope you liked the steam train cake. Yeah, it was supposed to be a steam train. Exact repro of the Flying Scotsman attempt by my father on my eighth birthday, the one and only time he made an effort, green icing all over the kitchen walls, the fact that it looked like the Blob from Venus was neither here nor there, I was warm and tingly all over because he’d made an effort, when I think of that day I think of my father as my father with green icing on his nose grinning at me and not some guy who’d shuffled on in place of my real one while my real one was circumnavigating the globe on a raft armed with nothing but a bow and arrow and a fishing rod and nineteen packs of Bisto gravy and the Meccano set I never had in case he got bored mid-Pacific. I hope you’ve sung Happy Birthday to Me. The day this particular match flares it was nobody’s birthday. Nobody’s birthday in Number 25 Albermarle Terrace, that is. Milly thinks of Lucifer when the match catches on the side of George’s shoe. Seriously she does. Those of you whose brains are irredeemably damaged by drink and drugs and automobile exhausts and nuclear leaks and pesticides and stuff will need to be told how matches used to be called lucifers or lucifer matches just as I used to be called Spotted or Spotted Dick. And also how matches are no longer called lucifers generally speaking in 1913 except by stone-deaf hags in remote little villages like Bracknell or Milton Keynes or certainly Zennor because Zennor is the last place on the list of the guy going around with his megaphone telling everybody to drop the lucifer and he’s slow and old because he’s been doing this since about 1871. He struck out from Abbas Combe in Somerset for Abberley way up near Droitwich and then down to Essex for Abberton and then back up near Droitwich again for another Abberton for crying out loud and then he looks at his list and groans because Abberwick’s Northumberland and huddled up in Abberwick with the wind moaning off the North Sea about men not being men any more as in the days of St Cuthbert as if anyone called Cuthbert could be anything but a wimp he orders another malt because Abbess Roding is south of Bishop’s Stortford and anyway he’s not sure anyone’s taking any notice and these are the days before tarmacadam and it was a bad winter but he has faith, he has a mission, he is systematic, he isn’t fooling around, he tosses back his malt and clutches his little lamp and wraps his cloak tight around him and out he goes into the freezing Northumberland air with his tinderbox dry and so stumps on through mud and storm and snow

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.