Book Book by Fiona Farrell

Author:Fiona Farrell [Fiona Farrell]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781869796211
Publisher: Penguin Random House New Zealand
Published: 2011-02-15T00:00:00+00:00

14.

Life would go on. No more human contacts, other people’s emotions washing at the brain — he would be free again. Nothing to think about but himself. Myself: the word echoed hygienically on among the porcelain basins, the taps and plugs and wastes. He took the revolver out of his pocket and loaded it.

Brighton Rock by Graham Greene

Their mother returned just before Christmas. Kate and Maura arrived home from school one afternoon to the house heavy with the scent of strawberry jam and there she was in the kitchen, stirring figure of eights in the sweet brew in the copper pan.

‘Have a nice day?’ she said, as if she had been gone only an hour or two. Then she showed them her Post Office Savings Bank book. The deposit column had sixty four pounds, two shillings and sixpence in it. Plenty for From the Spey to the Kilmog, and some over besides. Their father refused to contemplate the triumph.

‘Bloody daft,’ he said.

Their mother said she had prayed and God had told her to go home. She had opened the Bible as she did each morning, to find her instruction for the day, and it had fallen open at If two lie together, then they have heat: but how can one be warm alone? The day before, at work, the floor polisher, a great heavy thing with rotary polishers that slid about awkwardly on the lino, had wrenched itself from her grasp and driven a rent right across the floor of the entrance foyer. It was a sign. She had left her job that very day, packed the Morris, and come home.

And it was as well she had, for a few weeks later Pat collapsed on his way up Wharf Street reading the meters. Simply went very white and fell sideways into the vicarage hedge. The vicar’s wife saw him fall and phoned Kate’s mother. ‘A touch of flu,’ said Pat, irritable as he stood unsteadily and was driven home. But the joints at elbow and knee became red. They swelled to puffy balls of exquisite pain, too tender to be touched. The thistle shreds of metal from Alamein, the doctor said, were to blame. Though tiny, they were releasing poisons into muscle and bone. In the months that followed, the fingers on each hand began to twist in odd directions like the stems of a plant grown out of its proper place, under a wall or between stones. His legs became weak and spindly. Walking became progressively more difficult. He was forced to abandon his job in the open air, walking about the streets from house to house. He had to become an office wallah after all.

‘Mahleesh,’ he said. That meant there were others worse off than himself. His mate Walker, for example, out at Weston, his stomach shot to pieces and riddled with ulcers, the effects — long delayed — of a couple of years in a POW camp. He meant the young blokes who were dry bone and dust in the African desert.

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