Born Yesterday Read Online Free PDF Page B

potentially sordid transaction – the basement living room, the gorging, the trips to the bathroom, back to New! and EastEnders ; a woman scoring her drug of choice at the local Tesco – that he failed to react when the man who had been serving him – he was a handsome African called ‘Tevo’, according to his ID badge – raised his hand and impatiently beckoned the next customer.
    By the time he bent to pick up his second bag – it was the one with the bottles – he found it trapped behind the legs with the white spray-on jeans, bunched at the ankles and pleated behind the knees. With a smile which in the years ahead she would no doubt come to bestow on Aidspatients and cheering crowds lining the streets of Papua, New Guinea and good souls who have offered retired guide dogs a final home, she reached down and swung the bag over at him (she knew very well by now he had clocked her) with a clink.
    A couple of minutes later she followed him through the automatic doors, and that’s when the fun really started.
    What had been an ordinary evening street scene of shoppers and buses, the alkie with his dog squatted by the cashpoint, the phoners and texters, the smokers loitering outside the Louisiana rib-shack, the Lebanese juice-bar, the traditional pub recently turned into a branch of Babushka, all Tesco’s near-neighbours, became all at once a phantasmagoria.
    It was like Kate Middleton’s appearance on the street was the cue for special effects to turn the rain machine on, for the music to be brought up high and the smokers, taciturn and sullen to that point, to become animated into a jostling crowd scene.
    The big glass door slid open, and she emerged, and it was like the opening sequence of a high-end video with the tracking shots and the overhead cranes, or a musicalised play by Dennis Potter where the heroine opens her mouth and sings in the rumbling Negro baritone of the Deep River Boys, and the beggar throws off his tattered blanket and stumblebum drunkenness and hoofs it through one of the more challenging routines of Fred Astaire or Gene Kelly.
    The skies opened and the hail hammered down. Therewas a soundtrack, and it was provided by some kids in a car pumping out the hit of the summer which, as luck would have it, was called ‘Umbrella’ by Rihanna (feat. Jay-Z), which had apparently started a craze around the clubs for smuggling in collapsible umbrellas that were suddenly raised and whirled around the dance floor, Gene Kelly fashion, whenever the song by Rihanna (feat. Jay-Z) came on.
    So it was July and it was like Singin’ in the Rain and it was also like the scene at the end of White Christmas when Bing and Danny Kaye and all the cast gather round the tree to sing the title song while snow softly gusts in from the street at the back of the stage.
    Except the hailstones hurt. They were big and saw-edged and could cause minor abrasions to bald heads.
    The man petting the dog belonging to the guy bedded down beside the money hole-in-the-wall turned out to be a pap, who leapt into action the minute his target appeared. And then a second snapper emerged from the door to the cinema, and a third and fourth from the entrance to the pizza restaurant, while others kerb-crawled alongside her in cars and on motorbikes, the ice-balls ricocheting crazily off the Zuni-beetle shells of their big phallic Leicas and the semi-spherical peaks of their truckers’ caps and their windscreens, and seemed oblivious to members of the public yelling at them to leave the girl alone!
    There are really two kinds of life, notes the American writer James Salter. There is the one people believe you are living, and there is the other. It is this other which causes the trouble, this other we long to see.

Chapter Two
    Click to create a shrine. Unlike a gravestone, these tributes will not weather over the years.
    Abukar Mohammed 1991 to 2007
Aged: 16
From: Stockwell
     
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