Alentejo Blue Read Online Free PDF Page A

this girl, Ruby. She has left the school, she has nothing to do but make trouble. There was a fight between her and the whores up at the brothel. Know where it is? By the GNR – the police look out for the girls. This fight – I heard it was really something – the whores said she ruined their business, giving it away for free.’ He shifted his knees and bumped the table and steadied it. ‘That is the story. Probably it isn’t true. But it is the story.’
    Stanton pictured the girl, her T-shirt sawn off below the breasts, her fuck-you walk, the ludicrous stolen sunglasses crusted with butterflies. Fifteen, maybe sixteen. Anaemic skin and dimpled knees. Unattractive, uneducated, disabled. That hearing aid was prehistoric. ‘Poor bitch,’ he said and got up, deciding against another beer and for a Macieira.
    He went outside to the pickup and pressed his hand against the door panel where the sun glazed the red metal white. He drove out of the village, past the lines of orange trees that bordered the narrow pavements, past the water pump where a bent old woman filled plastic containers, past the small square with garish flowerbeds and a dark green frog-plagued pond, and turned right after the traffic lights which were there not to control the traffic (of which there was a dearth) but to raise a flag to the future.
    He entered the house and went straight to the computer in the bedroom. All the furniture had ended up there, apart from a couple of chairs and a stool on the terrace. In his mind a correlation had grown between the emptiness of the house and the quality of his work, the sparseness of one promising the fullness of the other. He read over the last few pages on the screen, making deletions and additions and willing himself into the story. He stood up and sat back down. He set his jaw and willed himself submerged. It was hopeless. It was like deciding to commit suicide and trying to drown with your face in the washbasin.
    He closed his computer and resolved to suffer no more interruptions to his mornings. Taking his book he went to the terrace and looked out over the garden to the cork oaks beyond, the rich earth-red trunks where the bark had been harvested, the spreading mossy branches that reached back to some ancient time. Stanton sat down and opened the book and was immediately distracted by a lizard flickering in and out of an empty flowerpot. He returned to the book, trudged through half a chapter then hurled it down into the garden.
    It was possibly the worst book he had ever tried to read. He decided this and instantly felt bloated with research. He was like a sumo wrestler stepping into ballet shoes and hoping to pirouette. What more, in any case, could he learn about Blake? If he knew less about him, it would be easier to write the novel. Hell, he might even be able to make some things up.
    Without locking the door, a habit he had forced himself to break, he went down the steps from the terrace and turned out of the garden and along past the tender-leafed eucalyptus that said shush-shush and were still and stirred and quieted again. He walked his usual track into the cork oak woods that began where the eucalyptus left off, with no sense of relish except for the gin he would pour when he got home. There were pines dotted among the corks and he picked up a cone, carried it for a while and let it drop.
    The trees spread thinly, giving way now and then to grass and sheep. Over his shirt the shepherd wore a sheepskin, a hole cut for his head and a string tied in place around the middle. Stanton waved. All day – the man spent all day watching sheep. The thinness of his own endeavour was shaming.
    Coming into a clearing where some old trees had been felled and the spring flowers grew more intense, he paused. There were anemones here, cistus and soapwort and wild geranium. The gorse spurted yellow over the tree stumps.
    ‘You’re English,’ said the boy. Stanton had not noticed him approach.
    ‘Hello,