Cosmo Cosmolino Read Online Free PDF

He fought to speak to her, her ear was againsthis face, but his grunts were swallowed in the weird soughing that filled the ward, the sound of the room itself labouring for breath.
    Natalie backed away and I fell into step behind her. She was almost running. The big door flopped shut after us, and the waiting faces lifted and swung in our direction like a shoal of satellite dishes. I looked at the clock. We had been inside for barely a minute.
    â€˜What was that noise?’ I jabbered. ‘I heard a noise.’
    â€˜I didn’t hear it,’ said Natalie. ‘I block out everything.’
    She kept walking fast, barging towards the elevator. She certainly did not need me, but I hurried in her wake, and down in the lobby she paused long enough to turn her blank face towards me, and nod.
    â€˜I’m going home,’ she said. ‘Don’t come. I’m going home.’
    I stood still, to let her get away from me. When she had become a member of the crowd, I walked slowly, on chalky legs, through the lobby of the hospital.
    It was cool there. The hallway was wide and clean, and the floor was made of green marble tiles that shone. I looked up at the stained-glass windows. All I could make out was a figure standing with its arms spread wide and its bare feet balanced, low down in the frame, on what looked like a stack of sandbags. No: they were clouds.
    I thought I would have something to eat, somewhere. And after that I had better find myself a hotel.
    I tried to walk briskly towards the door; but somebody was standing in the shadow of the huge sandstone pillars which supported the entrance porch. It was a child in a cape, a little boy.
    He was hunched over from the waist, working with ferocious concentration on a black metal object he was holding in both hands. His head was bent over his task, but as I walked towards him I could clearly see his face in profile, and trembling with shock and distress though I was, my steps shortened of their own accord, for I felt that I knew him, that in some book or gallery I had seen his picture, or a picture of somebody like him. Out of respect I placed my feet more lightly on the marble floor; and just as I drew level with him he straightened his spine, raised his head, and extended his gun arm towards me in a slow, vertical arc. I saw then what he was: I recognised him. I stood still in front of him. I presented myself: for he was no longer playing. He was here on business, acting on orders. He was a small, serious, stone-eyed angel of mercy.

Kim’s fatherwas supposed to come down from Queensland or wherever he lived to straighten her life out for her, give her some good advice, pay her uni fees and so on, or even take her back up there to live with him. He promised he’d be there in June, for her birthday, but for some reason he couldn’t make it by the date. Then it was going to be August, then September. She was hanging out for this. She stopped going anywhere, in case he turned up while she was out and the others in the house let him get away without giving him her message, to make himself at home and wait ten minutes. First she used to sew, till the machine broke down, and anyway the whine of the motor was starting to make her nervous. Then she drew, or wrote for hours in her diary. Then she read, lying on her bed in a worn-out old nightie, nibbling at the ends of herhair, but she said the books she was supposed to be studying were so boring that she kept dozing off.
    Then things got to the point with her where all she could do was sleep. Awake, whatever she heard threw her into a state of nerves: the wind when it bumped, a bird in a tree outside the window, the water rustling down the gutters when the council workers opened the hydrants. Her fearfulness filled Raymond with impatient scorn, and relief that he was not after all the most hopeless person he knew. The morning a truck poured a ton of blue metal chips down in the lane outside, he came back