Communion Town Read Online Free PDF Page B

your job without destroying my property? Do you think that’s unfair? More to the point, are you intending to compensate me for the damage?’
    I didn’t reply, but I had a notion I wouldn’t be getting paid for this run.
    ‘I thought not,’ he said. I could tell that this conversation wearied him very much. ‘Hold out your hand. The right one. Palm upwards. Come on, get on with it.’
    Without knowing why, I found myself obeying. I watched my right hand reach out to offer him my palm. He took off his belt, wrapped half its length around his fist, and tugged, testing its strength. Then he stopped. She had climbed out as well, and was finding her footing on the treacherous pavement.
    ‘Wait a mo,’ he said, his tone changing. ‘Where are you going, we’re nowhere –’
    She ignored him and picked her way around the mired rickshaw. As she went past, she leaned close to me and said: ‘You shouldn’t let him speak to you like that.’
    The crystals fell in behind her as she walked away.
     
    Ten days later at the Institute of Humane Sciences, a lecture had just ended and the central hall was blocked with students, their voices flooding the barrel-vault roof which had previously echoed only the squeaks of my rubber soles. My daytime job was for an agency which supplied me with dark green overalls and sent me to the university, where I worked my way around the corridors, lecture theatres and seminar rooms, wielding long-handled pincers and pushing a cart stocked with cleaning products and refuse bags.
    The students drank coffee from tall paper cups and had a lot to say. The girls’ hands flashed and the boys squared up to each other jokily with their chins raised. I trundled along the edge of the hall. This, I had realised, was where I had seen her before, and since that snowy night I had glimpsed her almost every day, arguing eagerly with other students, carrying books out of the library or, often, quarrelling in public with one tall youth or another – it pleased her to embarrass her admirers. As I caught sight of her now, though, she was glancing around, fiddling with an unlit cigarette, not quite listening to her friends.
    Without warning she turned her back on them and strode towards me. I fumbled hastily in my cart.
    ‘You can’t keep staring,’ she said, ‘and then have nothing to say to me.’
    Her friends, their circle still open from where she had broken away, watched us. I was at a loss and said nothing. Her eyes looked sore, as if she’d been out late somewhere smoky, but they remained fixed on me, insisting on an answer.
    ‘What are you going to do, then?’
     
    *  *  *
     
    Her bedroom was up in the roof of one of the grand old Cento Hill tenements. Lying tangled in a sheet, watching the snow dot the pane above my face, I thought about the daft bounty of the universe. This warm, shambolic nest, with her paperbacks heaped on the mantelpiece, photos of her family tacked to the walls, her guitar leaning in the corner, drawings her friends had made for her and postcards they’d sent, many-coloured underthings trailing from the dresser drawer: yesterday I couldn’t have begun to imagine it. A stray hair on the pillow tickled my cheek: it was crimson with a dark inch at the root. The toothpaste-streaked sink was lined with lipsticks, mascara tubes and contact lens paraphernalia. Her eyes troubled her, I had learnt, but she refused to wear her glasses.
    I struggled among the sheets until I was propped up on my elbows, and let my laughter pass as a silent shudder. A wave of sleepiness followed, and I considered giving into it. I breathed in the spicy fug. The city lay outside like a vast gift for which I had always only needed to ask. A song was playing. I’d never heard anything like it, but the twangling music was just another miracle of the afternoon, and I let it run through me, the singer drawling about silver saxophones, the Queen of Spades and a dancing child with a flute.
    Bitter smoke had