Enthralled by Lance Porter

Author:Lance Porter
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780753537428
Publisher: Ebury Publishing

Ten

‘Do not look around in the streets of a city …’

I never seriously regretted my decision to become Jasmine’s drudge. Certainly things could have been better for me, but true to the earth sign under which I was born I regarded my circumstances in a pragmatic light. I simply judged between the life I led at the mansion and the one I’d left behind. I did not introduce could be’s or should be’s into the equation. That was Kim’s way, always striving to transcend the working day, believing in corny dreams of love and success.

I asked myself two questions: What have I given up? The answer: a car, a flat, a job and a permanent sense of frustration. And what have I gained? Proximity to the ass of my dreams. Admittedly, my position was hazardous and uncertain; but then what is so unusual about that these days? I led a life of extremes, elated by Jasmine’s unwitting indulgences one moment and trampled under her feet the next. But what more could I hope for? I was a man without resources, a man of average looks and ability, and I was cursed with a taste for beautiful women.

As the weeks passed and I grew more adept at my work, I managed to find a little time for myself, usually while I ran errands. If I was in the city centre I might grab a coffee and browse through a newspaper. Once an avid reader of the tabloids, I was developing a taste for the quality press now. Instead of poring over titillating pictures of pop divas and smutty exposés of Hollywood starlets, I rooted out reports of wars and atrocities. I especially liked the dispatches from the correspondents who were out there in the thick of things. I could fairly hear the bullets whistling past their ears and the shells exploding overhead as I read.

If you’d seen me sitting at a corner table in a city café, scanning the narrow columns of print through my reading glasses, you’d have taken me for an earnest fellow who wanted to get to the bottom of things. And in a sense you’d have been right – I have always been drawn to the bottom of things, as if I were especially sensitive to the pull of gravity. But you shouldn’t think I read in the quest for greater knowledge or in the hope of acquiring an insight into this or that development. I turned to those tales of horror for self-confirmation, nothing more. To speak frankly, they put my own minuscule sufferings in perspective and strengthened my Old Testament convictions about the wrathfulness of God. I swallowed that day’s news like the strong black coffee I always ordered, and when I got up from my chair and folded the paper under my arm, this convulsing world of ours was a gentle stimulus in my blood.

If the weather was fine I would plant myself on a park bench and watch the ducks and geese floating around on the lake.

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