Always the Sun Read Online Free PDF Page B

twice, he tested how a certain mattress was sprung. An assistant, a nervous woman in outsize spectacles, asked if he required help. Hastily, Sam selected a bed and demanded to buy it.
    It was delivered a few days later by a high-sided, racing-green van. Sam signed for it and, alone, he lugged the flatpacks and plastic-wrapped double mattress upstairs. It wasn’t easy. He sat on the daytime twilight of the highest step, sweating and breathing heavily. Then he went to his sunny bedroom and assembled the bed. When it was finished, he stood back and admired his work. The bed was iron-framed, with a new-smelling, unstained mattress whose protective plastic, ripped open, was now unfolding itself loosely in the doorway. He tested it by springing up and down on his arse. Soon he remembered that this was the only bouncing on beds he was likely to get up to for some time and he stopped bouncing and looked disconsolately around himself. He realized that he’d neglected to buy any bedding. He spent another night in the faintly odorous sleeping bag, like a giant pupa on the naked mattress.
    In the morning, he returned to John Lewis and, somewhat sheepishly, wandered again around the bedding department. He was worried that he might appear to be some kind of fetishist, but the nervous woman wasn’t there and no other member of staff gave the least sign of remembering him. Back home, it took him a great deal of time and effort to stuff and cajole the new duvet into its cotton sheath. That had always been Justine’s job and, he had long supposed, more trouble to learn than it could ever be worth.
    When the job was done, the bed looked virginal and white. He thought of a photograph in a magazine. It seemed a pity to defile it by sweating and dribbling into its crisp, cotton whiteness. That night, he laid the sleeping bag on the wooden floor alongside the iron bedframe. He bundled up an old jacket to use as a pillow and set the still-unread and much deteriorated paperback talismanically alongside him.
    Once he felt settled in, there was nothing to do. During the day, he sometimes allowed himself to wander round to Mel’s, even if it risked spoiling their fun.
    He’d walk through her front garden gate and round the back of the grey, pebble-dashed house. If the weather was very good, Mel would be in the scurfy, psoriatic back garden whose half-collapsed fence backed on to a cul-de-sac of garages. The garages were a design-feature of the estate, and for years they’d been put to most frequent use by kids: during the day they were playgrounds, somewhere to ride bikes and play football and cricket. During the hours of darkness they were the location of those heady adolescent pursuits that in hindsight seem so innocent. In such terrain, Sam lost his virginity to a girl called Tina Marie, both of them drunk on cider. He remembered the T-shirt gathered and ruched at her neck, the raindrop pattern of lovebites on her breasts and neck, her cigarette breath, her chipped nail varnish, her knickers hooked on one ankle, her doll-blank eyes. He remembered something like dread as the orgasm surged at the root of his penis.
    At the far end of Mel’s garden there stood the rusty swing she’d bought for Jamie, second-hand, ten or eleven years ago. Despite its decrepitude, she still treated it as a bench. As he approached the house, he knew by its gentle creaking if Mel was in the garden. It was a sound he associated with midsummer torpor.
    Mel would be talking in a gossipy murmur to her friend, a woman who for so long had been known as Fat Janet that all the insult had drained from it. (When opprobrium was called for, she was known instead as Janet the Planet.) Fat Janet had baby features packed into the centre of her face and fine, blonde hair pulled into a ponytail that was hazy-tipped with split ends. In theory she had a husband called Jim, a limp, grey cardigan of a man. But Sam couldn’t remember meeting him since a party in the mid-1980s, when