Young Man, I Think You're Dying by Joan Fleming

Author:Joan Fleming [JOAN FLEMING]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781780020099
Publisher: The Langtail Press Ltd

CHAPTER VIII

IT WAS SHORTLY after Sledge had left the Bogeys’ flat on the day Amrita “fell” seventeen stories to her death that Mrs. Bogey arrived home unexpectedly; tired but smiling with pleasure that she had survived her air journey safely, even though it had meant a train from Manchester. Laden with presents from Ireland for her husband and son, she staggered out of the lift with her suitcase and entered her flat to find her son sitting on the hall floor with his head between his knees and a strange young lady in animated conversation with Mrs. Bogey’s dear but helpless husband. After kissing her family she took off her hat and coat and hurried into the kitchen to make tea; there was a lot to be explained and tea was essential. It was the sort of situation in which she excelled.

There was an Irish tweed jacket for Joe and a toy leprechaun on a piece of elastic, which she pinned to the curtain in her husband’s room “for luck”; Miss Frances Smith was accepted without question and tea dispensed.

The first thing had to be an ecstatic description of the twins, which went on for several minutes. When the tea was drunk Mr. Bogey thought it was time for her to have a little rest but Mrs. Bogey swept all idea of “tiredness after her journey” aside. There was a crisis on and nothing, to Mrs. Bogey, was more stimulating.

She apologised for her delayed return; there had been trouble over the air ticket and she had had to wait at Dublin Airport until a cancelled seat on a plane had been available; she had had no opportunity to telephone. She looked from her husband to her son and across to Miss Frances Smith, half sitting on the window-sill, looking dreamily down to the bright, now shining river.

“Now what’s been happening?” she wanted to know.

“It’s Sledge!” Joe’s Dad said.

Sledge’s ugly visit, seen and heard by Frances Smith and certainly heard by his father, had somehow made Joe’s troubles everybody’s; his mother could not possibly have arrived home at a better moment. Joe Bogey’s problem had become universal.

“It would be,” Joe’s Mum nodded, tapping her fingers restlessly, but that was the only way in which her manner fell short of perfection. She detested Sledge and suspected that he had led her son into situations which he would never otherwise have considered, but for the sake of keeping her small family together she had resolutely refrained from criticism. Nothing she heard about Sledge would surprise her; she only trusted vaguely in Joe’s being “all right”; that belief only had kept her mouth shut over the years; that, and the hope that Joe would “grow out of Sledge.”

But she was prepared for the worst and the worst it was: “… I’ve driven him often,” Joe argued as though to himself, “you know that. Yes, I do know he often went on what you’d call ‘robbery expeditions,’ he always gave us an outline of what he was doing but we asked no questions.

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