Blue Skies Read Online Free PDF

with perspective.
    First off were the lady bowlers. They disembarked just past the airport and disappeared into a little wooden clubhouse by the roadside. We drove on, round scrubby hills, blue-green and smooth at a distance, coarse-grassed and rocky up close. Dotted on these hills were little trees with rounded tops: toffee-apple trees from nursery wallpaper. Overhead the high bright blue sky was stretched tight and shiny between pink-tinged clouds. The road ahead was a shoelace of white dust. The colours were primary, hard-edged, acrylic-clear. I scraped myself, in my bus shell, across the perfect clarity and colour of that day—a bag of white skin full of passionate reds and purples and boiling yellow-green jealousies. If the bag split, those colours would spill out and spoil the scenery. But it didn’t. There was no bursting with happiness. Or anything else.
    As the bus lurched round the next corner I saw Ben waiting. He was waiting for his mail, he said. He had a lot of friends overseas, and their pale blue letters filled his canvas mailbag and his life with interest.

    Once Ben had tried living overseas. He took his wife and son and went by boat to England: to a small dingy room in London, where the rat aspects and dirt of big-city life got him down. So they moved to a small provincial city in the Midlands, where they rented the last house in a long row of grey terraced houses. Some claimed that it was the longest terrace in England; later the National Trust put a preservation order on it. The end house, his house, ended in a blind brick wall facing bleak countryside. During the first week there he borrowed a ladder and painted his wall with a bright tropical landscape, and it became a local landmark. A man from the Sunday Times came and took a photograph of it, and it was reproduced in the colour supplement as an example of urban street art. Someone cut it out and sent it to him, and he pinned it on his workroom wall. It hung there now, fly-spotted and brittle-yellow with summer heat.
    Through his back windows Ben had been able to see nothing but ploughed fields, in which, it seemed, nothing was ever planted or grew. In winter, snow fell and it was white and silent all round for miles—except for his incongruously glowing tropical landscape. It was so glittering and pure and clean that his nerve broke. One evening, after picking a quarrel and breaking all the windows, he ran away, back to London, where he spent ten grey days, worrying his wife sick as she waited it out in that cold English landscape burning his pictures to keep his son alive and warm. So he had nothing to show for it. A wasted trip.
    I knew of this, not from him, but from Gloria. We sat together one day by a dried-up summer creek; she with a shoebox of photographs to show me: mementoes of the trip. To make the most of it, they had taken the long way home, through Europe and various other bits of the world. She showed me a photograph of herself with son in arms on top of the Leaning Tower of Pisa.
    â€˜That’s where I had decided to commit suicide. I was going to jump—I would have put the boy down first, of course—but Ben stopped me. I think people who try to stop other people killing themselves are boring. And stupid.’
    She placed the lid back on the shoebox and told me the story of their trip. Her face in shadow under her large sun hat, all the snow and ice and the miserable solitude that she described seemed safely at a distance— a vast distance. I smiled and held her hand as we walked slowly back to the house. I hoped that she felt safe in her hot land.

    I saw Ben waiting for the bus, the mail and, it being Thursday, me. The bus pulled up at his feet. The dancing dust surrounded him in a cloud. He was wearing a long black djebella and sandals—a misplaced Arab.
    The local people thought him mad.
    They thought his wife noble, fine and longsuffering.
    They thought his son a poor little mite to have such a