A Life in Men: A Novel Read Online Free PDF

implying something more shady, pathetic, and irrevocable than it does for the rest of them, who are really just kids. Yank’s long legs hang off the edge of his bed, which of course is nothing more than a mattress on the floor. Heat rushes to Mary’s face.
This
—this sad, aging man—is what she found so intimidating? A jazz tape is still playing, and she presses “stop” to see if he’ll stir, but he doesn’t. She takes the tape out and holds it for a moment in her hand. Jack Teagarden, another artist she’s never heard of. She puts it back where she found it, though she does not press “play” again, merely grabs her rucksack and hurries once more out the door.
    There are so many things I forgot to ask you at the Athens Airport. Like how much of being a woman is synonymous with having to lie. Like why adulthood is a house of mirrors, and every time I turn another corner, collect another experience, the walls just seem to multiply with more versions of me, more secret passageways I don’t understand. Like why I crossed an ocean to meet the man you loved, but haven’t had even half the nerve to look for him now that I’m here. Like why, once
today
becomes important, “the future” is automatically fucked.
    E ARL’S C OURT ISN’T one of Yank’s favorite Tube stations because it tends to be crowded and well manned, which increases his chance of getting busted. On days when Nicole runs the coin scam with him, though, they’ve got to hit bigger stations, ones with more than one ticket machine, so today they’ll start out here—at least the machines are close to the exit, in case they have to run. At the stations he usually haunts, where sometimes no one’s even on duty and he can stand for half an hour at one ticket machine, milking it until it runs out of change, he and Nicole couldn’t tag-team. Theoretically they can make twice the money between them, and the girl hands all the cash over to him anyway, so why not use her? Of course in truth, since they have to spend time moving around from big station to big station, Yank suspects the bottom-line earnings are a wash.
    He has to admit, though, Nicole’s great at prep. Her delicate fingers move quick and efficient as a child’s in a sweatshop, wrapping and unwrapping the coins, preparing them for the swap. With Joshua rarely around anymore, sometimes Yank just gets the scale out first thing after he wakes, and he and Nicole pass hours that way: diligently wrapping ten-pence coins in aluminum foil, then weighing the coins and unwrapping or wrapping more accordingly, until each ten pence weighs
exactly
the same as a fifty-pence piece on the scale. Yank’s always prepared now, keeping the coins jammed in his duffel bag wherever he goes. Even if he trusted everyone at Arthog House not to steal the coins (which he certainly does not), there is no way to know when he may have to make a break for it, so anything important Yank keeps on him, in what Nicole calls his “bag of tricks.”
    The swapping today proceeds routinely, as Yank drops the first carefully wrapped ten-pence coin into a ticket machine, presses “cancel,” and watches a shiny new fifty-pence piece fall into the coin-return slot.
    Repeat.
    At a return of forty pence a shot, doing this a hundred times a day, he’s made a forty-pound profit—a neat two hundred a week
with
weekends off. More than enough money for basics like food, drink, tobacco, and hash, with a tidy sum left over for luxuries like rent.
    Not heroin.
    It goes without saying that he could make a better living if he went back to dealing, but for over a year he’s steered clear. Most of that time he was on the run, keeping out of London altogether until a particular police investigation died down, and on the lam he found creative ways to put food in his belly if not always a roof over his head. He killed time in Marseille, bummed his way up to Paris and around Belgium, before judging it safe to return to London, so long as he