All the Voices Cry Read Online Free PDF

It was junk. Champlain’s Astrolabe, now that had been a true treasure.
Brian would have liked to have been the boy who found it, but at least he had not been the man who dropped it. Poor Champlain, vertiginous with anxiety as the pole star came up and he found himself in a land whose known reach extended no further than the length of his bug-bitten arms. The feeling of visceral dropping away would be as bad as misplacing your keys in the forest, or locking them inside the – and here Brian had a moment of clarity – locking them inside the car in the middle of Quebec.
    Brian stood very still, trying to think what to do. He looked around him, as if the very trees were about to start making incomprehensible sounds.
    What did Champlain do after he lost his astrolabe? He walked on into the unknown. Brian walked on. He came to the edge of a cleared field and saw ahead of him a tumulus-shaped hill topped by a Quonset hut, its front end ringed in lights. A large billboard dominated the corner of the field. Danseuses 7 Jours . Brian’s French was improving.
    He set out across the field towards the building, his boots sinking into the ridges between the cold stubble of last year’s corn stalks. Clods of earth attached themselves to the soles of his boots until he felt weighed down like a giant. With a bit of luck Danseuses 7 Jours might also mean women dancing at eleven o’clock in the morning.
    He crossed the gravel parking lot, pushed open the metal door under the lights and ducked as a sparrow came flying out. He wondered what other problems the building had apart from animal infestation. A cleverly curved wall of mirrors ran
down one side. In front of the mirrors were a couple of empty risers and three vacant aluminum poles. The bar was at the far end of the room, beyond the high tables and a jukebox that glowed in a rainbow of light. Brian peered into the dim distance where a dash of red moved rhythmically near the bar. Could it be the glimmer of light on a ruby tassel? How little I really know about Quebec, he thought. Gallic societies are so much more generous than Anglo-Saxon ones, when it comes to tassels.
    No tassels. Just a woman wearing the longest red and black plaid overshirt that Brian had ever seen. She was mopping the floor with sullen strokes. Her eyebrows met head to head like embattled tadpoles, squaring off at each other whenever she frowned over the tanned arrow of her nose. Her ears and nostrils glimmered with pierced gold. Every so often she stopped and sucked in her cheeks, as if life had given her a drink with a disagreeable taste, to be taken through a straw at regular intervals.
    Brian took his boots off to show his goodwill towards the woman with the mop. He put his hands up in a gesture of submission while he walked in slowly, saying “anglaisie anglaisie.” All he wanted was a drink and a chance to use the phone, although the thought occurred to him that mopping might be part of her routine.
    She must have read his thoughts, for she pulled him half a pitcher of Rickard’s, poured the first glass and brought it over to the table. Brian was glad for such generous, speechless understanding. Under the plaid thing she must surely be
narrow-waisted, full-breasted. What did Champlain do when he met strange women? He addressed them cheerfully.
    â€œHere’s to the heroes,” said Brian, waving his glass at a newly framed photograph of Les Canadiens holding aloft the Stanley Cup. The woman turned away unsmiling and began spraying the counter out of a squeeze bottle.
    Brian watched her, entranced. Perhaps the problem with Kelvin was that he had yet to find a girlfriend. What he needed was a woman whose touch shocked him, whose presence confused his thought processes, who rendered his entire body as brilliantly lit as a landing strip. Brian had felt that way about Cynthia, at the beginning. Once he had narrowly escaped a collision between his bike and a car. At the time