Always the Sun Read Online Free PDF

television and sofa. The rug, still grubby with their London footfalls, was a postage stamp.
    Although Sam lacked any real sense of aesthetics, he’d long ago become adept at second-guessing Justine’s taste. It started as a survival mechanism contrived to abbreviate shopping trips; now he found himself furnishing the house on Balaarat Street as if Justine might soon arrive at the door, browned and relaxed and pleased to see him after an extended painting holiday (to where? Morocco? Andalucía?). She would clap her hands to her mouth and exclaim her surprise and delight in his cleverness, his thoughtfulness, his eagerness to make her happy.
    Engaged by this fantasy, he allowed consideration of the tiniest domestic details to fill his day. He would rise, shower, shave, then make breakfast and wander to the bus stop. In town he might spend an entire morning examining and comparing curtains or lampshades, rugs or kettles. He bought curtains to please Justine—bleached Egyptian cotton, just long enough to brush the wooden floor. He hummed and hawed and scratched his big, square jaw, examining items of cutlery from all angles, testing them for weight and balance and quality of line.
    In the evenings, when the curtains were hung and the cutlery was in the drawer, when the new kettle or new toaster stood in its appointed place in the kitchen, when the new mirrors were hung in the hallway and bedroom and bathroom, when the telephone stood on its new table in the hallway and the CDs were ranked in their new shelves, when the new towels hung folded on the heated rail, the walls receded from him.
    Justine was not coming back from holiday and he missed his sister and his son, eating oven chips and fish fingers and tomato ketchup in a small, crammed, chaotic, tobacco-smelling house half a mile down the road. It didn’t occur to him to join them. He was as unwelcome as he was loved.
    Instead, he watched television and yearned to sleep. Often, he consulted his watch to find it was somehow 2 or 3 a.m. He couldn’t read. For weeks, he’d been carrying round the same spine-broken and unread paperback. Several times a day, he attempted to read a page, but even if he was able to muster the necessary concentration, he’d lost his place and the passages he read and re-read lacked context and continuity.
    Television didn’t relax him. It flickered and glimmered, spectral blue on the walls behind him. As it grew late, he lowered the volume. Yet it seemed to shriek ever more stridently. In direct proportion to diminishing content, the programmes became frenetically edited until, after 1 a.m., it was easy to believe he was watching a random, flashing sequence of unconnected images, most of which depicted young people shouting at one another.
    Once or twice, he tried the radio instead. But the sound of a small, intimate voice echoing from the unadorned walls of the big, empty house made him feel lonely and spooked. Sometimes when he was alone, he thought he heard movement upstairs—footsteps on the hallway and bedroom floor. Quickly, he turned on the television.
    Eventually, he went upstairs. He had yet to buy a bed for himself and was sleeping on the bedroom floor, cocooned in a sleeping bag. In the morning he woke with a sexless erection, solid and springy as a rubber cosh. According to his need to urinate, it soon deflated. He looked down sadly as his penis relaxed in his hand like a dying bird.
    Eventually the day arrived when he decided it was no longer quite rational to keep delaying the purchase of something decent to sleep on. His clothes, although few, hung neatly from a chromium rack at one end of the bedroom. His socks and underwear were stuffed and rolled into the top drawer of a new, glue-smelling chest that had arrived, flatpacked, with Jamie’s. It seemed stupid to be sleeping on the floor.
    He caught a bus to John Lewis. He wandered round the bed department, his hands clasped Napoleonically at the small of his back. Once or