Cosmo Cosmolino Read Online Free PDF Page B

from the kitchen and found her on her knees in the corner with her head in the dirty clothes bag. He thought of laughing, till he saw that her eyes were bulging. There was a primary school behind where she lived. She couldn’t stand the noise the kids made in the yard at playtime, their screaming. It made her grind her teeth and blow her nose till it went red. ‘Somebody must be hurting them,’ she whispered. ‘They’re hurting each other.’
    â€˜You’re stupid,’ said Raymond irritably. ‘That’s a good sound. Aren’t kids supposed to be a good thing? You shouldn’t freak out over something that’s good .What’s the matter with you?’
    By October, though she lied about it, she was swallowing day by day in threes and fours the pills she got from her mother and sleeping the time away buried so flat in the quilt and pillows that when he came in hehad to feel around to make sure she was still there.
    â€˜Get in,’ she mumbled, too doped to open her eyes. ‘Less go to sleep.’
    The nightdress was twisted up round her waist and her skin was loose, like old sacking. She had about as much life in her as a half-deflated dummy, but without complaint she opened her legs, and he kept his face turned away, to avoid her breath. She grunted, that was all, and when he rolled away she made a limp effort to attach herself to his back; but she was a dead weight that could not hang on. Her arms’ grip weakened and her torso fell away. The cool air of the room shrank his bare spine. She snuffled, and a light rhythmic click began in the open membranes of her throat. He would have got up straight away except that the tick of her breathing matched itself briefly to his heartbeat, and at the moment of focusing on the leaves outside the glass his mind lost its grip on the edges of the furniture and slithered away into a comforting nest, a sty of warm webs and straw. Then the parrot screeched, in somebody’s back yard, and he woke.
    He raised himself on one elbow and looked back over his shoulder at her. She was only a small girl, with small bones, and her head too he had always thought of as small. Wandering round the city, the day after she had first dragged him home from a party where he was lurking sourly in a doorway, always too old or too awkward, always wearing the wrong clothes, he hadfound himself fitting words together in the part of his mind that no one knew about: he practised remarking casually, ‘She’s buttery’, or ‘She’s well-toothed’; but he never fell into conversation with anyone who looked interested in that way of talking—Alby certainly wasn’t—and now her face, like any drugged sleeper’s, was as thick, stupid and meaningless as a hunk of rock. He saw that there was nothing special about her; that he was superior to her after all. She was damaged goods. The pills were not to blame. The pills were doing him a favour by reminding him of something he had always known was in her, in any girl that age who would do what she did with him, and you could tell by the moron face they made when they were doing it, all vague and grinning. He imagined, propped there in his twisted pose while his insides congealed again into blankness, how he would describe her in the café if any of them stopped talking long enough. ‘She was more out of it than I’ve ever seen her. Mate, she was’—he would stick out his flat hands, palms down, and jerk them sharply apart—‘ out of it. This gig’s over. People who can’t get their shit together should just go and die .’
    It was late in the day. If he got up now he could make it to the Hare Krishnas for a feed. The girl downstairs was getting ready for work. As she called to her cat, her clogs on the cobbles of the lane made a sound like a tennis ball bouncing. While he pulled on his clothes, blocking out the irritating click of Kim’sopen