Campari for Breakfast Read Online Free PDF Page B

want to happen at all has also happened.
    Today, being a Wednesday, was the last day of my week at the Toastie. It was getting on for 10.00am, and I was expecting to finish my work and go back to Green Place as usual, and settle down to some writing.
    ‘Are your Mum and Dad coming down to visit you at all?’ asked Joe as we toiled with the toast, the froth and the steam.
    ‘No,’ I said. ‘Dad doesn’t like to leave the house at Titford, and my Mum is . . . not alive any more.’
    I deliberately didn’t use the ‘D’ word – I don’t like it much anyway, but also I knew it would come as a shock to a boy still blessed enough to have his mother just along the counter.
    ‘I’m so sorry,’ said Joe. ‘Whe— when did she pass away?’
    ‘September,’ I said.
    He squeezed my hand on top of the toaster. ‘I lost my Dad when I was ten, I understand what you must be going through.’
    ‘I’m so sorry,’ I said, and then there was a pause. Joe seemed unsure what else to say.
    ‘What happened?’ he continued unexpectedly. ‘Was she very ill?’
    ‘No, she committed suicide,’ I said.
    Poor Joe was so shocked that for a minute every cappuchino went cold and every slice of toast went hard and everything was still.
    In real life though, nothing ceases, except your loved one. You struggle on and nothing stops for a moment. Life inside you has changed for ever, but life outside goes on the same as before, and you have to go on living with that riddle every single day.
    ‘Do you need to go home?’ asked Joe then, looking grave.
    ‘No I’m fine,’ I said, ‘but let’s not talk about it now.’
    He squeezed my hand again over the toaster and then changed his tack. ‘Sandy’s having a party on Saturday night,’ he said. ‘I was wondering if you fancied coming?’
    ‘What a shame, I can’t,’ I said, ‘my Dad is coming over.’ Then I realised that I’d only just told him my dad didn’t like leaving the house, but it was out of my mouth before my editor was on to it. I just knew I couldn’t risk saying yes to Joe and possibly spoiling my chances with Icarus.
    ‘Oh, right,’ said Joe, and he smiled before getting badly distracted by some froth.
    Back in Titford, if someone like Joe had asked me out I would have jumped at the chance, but Icarus has changed all that in just three and a half short weeks, and without barely a word. But, as they say in the classics, the language of love is speechless. How he can say so much to me, without saying anything at all, is a bewitching justaposition.
    It was therefore some sort of miracle when, half an hour later, as I was in the kitchen buttering up the bread as usual, Icarus walked up behind me and said: ‘My brother Sandy is having a party on Saturday night, Sue, I was wondering if you fancied coming?’ The temperature in the kitchen rocketed and my knees knocked together. I held on to the counter without turning to face him because of my runaway cheeks. It was the most he had ever said to me. More than a word, more than a sentence, and so much more than a question. This was life, and it can suddenly happen.
    ‘I’d love to,’ I said, perhaps too willingly.
    ‘Great,’ he said. ‘See you Saturday, 6.30 till midnight,’ and he handed me a napkin with the address of a bar on it, and within a nanasecond he was gone. It said: ‘Saturday 14 th Feb, Sandy’s birthday at Christine’s’. The 14 th of Feb! That’s Valentine’s Day! Asking me out in the first place is a sure sign that Icarus likes me, but asking me out on Valentine’s Day , is just so bold . I feel so giddy that I could run through a fountain with my clothes on!
    As I walked home from the Toastie, every tree, every flower, even the seeds in the earth were singing my name. ‘Sue Bowl,’ they sang, ‘Look there goes Sue’, and all the builders wolf whistled. The February buds thrust their way up through the soil, threatening every minute to burst into flower under a sky as radiant as the