A Little London Scandal by Miranda Emmerson

Author:Miranda Emmerson
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Publisher: HarperCollins Publishers
Published: 2020-06-10T08:49:50+00:00

What’s the Matter With You, Rock?

There was a daddy-long-legs in the corner of Nik’s cell. It picked its way slowly – for reasons which he could only guess at – from the left-hand corner of the window to the top of the light on the opposite side of the room and then back again.

There was a telly in one of the rec rooms, but it had been smashed two weeks ago and the prisoners had been informed that they couldn’t have another one until the next part of the budget was received in the autumn. Nik tried to unpack some lovely memory in all the gloom, but everything stayed tightly shut. He desperately wanted to smoke. He hadn’t had a smoke in seven days.

As the night wore on and he tried to sleep, he found that pieces of the past started to spill open, unexpected and vivid, a trail of yolk running from a cracked egg. He saw himself on a beach, sitting on a blanket between his mother and his father. Dennis was little more than a baby and had dug himself a hole, where he sat sieving sand through his fingers. He wondered if it had been a Sunday morning. He wondered why they had not been at the shop. His father stood, he was wearing trousers but no shirt, and started singing, there on the almost empty beach.

Nik could not understand the words – they were all in Greek – but his father sang in great swinging phrases, tunes that sounded half like opera and half like something from a music hall. He lay back on his mother’s lap and watched her smile and her hair blow around them both in the wind. Nik felt that embarrassing and familiar feeling – caught between thrill and shame at his father’s oddness.

He remembered standing on the edge of the circus, the Coca-Cola sign swirling red, listening to the boys talk. He remembered laughing and hanging onto someone else’s shoulders, someone flapping madly with their hands at the pigeons gathering above their head. He remembered feeling that it was the most natural thing in the world that he should be someone different. Someone not like anybody else. Different and exceptional and odd, just like his father.

***

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.