Dance On My Grave Read Online Free PDF

some clean clothes ready for you in my room. First on the left outside here. Come in when you’re ready.’
    15/ AND THEN : In Barry’s room . . .
    ‘Luckily you’re nearly my size so this stuff ought to fit.’
    Laid out on his bed were a pair of light blue jockey shorts, a sweat shirt with narrow blue-and-white stripes (very français, very matelot), light blue jeans, washed pale and worn, blue ankle socks. Too much of the symphonics for my taste, but beggars . . .
    ‘What size shoes?’
    ‘Eights.’
    ‘I take nines. Hang on.’
    ‘I’ll manage with mine. They’ll dry on my feet.’
    He was lounging against the edge of a bench-desk watching me dress. The desk ran the whole length of the wall opposite the bed. I was envious. Not just the desk space, but the rows of shelves underneath crammed with books and records and the gear for a sophisticated quadrophonic system.
    ‘Nice,’ I said, nodding at the gear.
    ‘Benefit of owning a record shop.’
    Gorman Records on London Road in Westcliff. I’d been there a couple of times searching for cut-price discs. I’d seen Barry serving customers. A small shop. But busy. A Saturday morning hang-out.
    The whole room was very neat. Modern furniture arranged almost geometrically in a careful pattern. There was a repro of a picture by David Hockney above the bed, one of his California swimming pool paintings, ‘Pete getting out of Nick’s pool’. I knew it was Hockney because I liked his work too. Barry’s room reminded me, then, of the rooms in some of Hockney’s paintings of people in their houses. The way he stood and sat always reminded me, that day and afterwards, of those Hockney people. All part of an arrangement, like a still-life, a little too posed for real life, very clean, bright, clear-cut, airy. I liked their sharp-focus quality, and the feeling that there was something elusive, something waiting behind all that studied informality.
    For a second, with Barry leaning there watching me dress, I felt like a Hockney person myself. I quite enjoyed that. But—and I can’t explain this—I felt a twinge of fear too.
    The clothes fitted near enough. His jeans were an inchor so too long; I had to turn up the bottoms or I’d have been tripping over myself.
    ‘You’ll do for now,’ Barry said. He fished a comb from his back pocket and handed it to me. ‘There’s a mirror on the wall over there. You hungry?’
    ‘Beginning to be. Thought I’d nip home and grab something on the way to school.’
    ‘Soup and cheese ready and waiting downstairs.’
    I glanced at him in the mirror. Mirror mirror on the wall . . .
    ‘You’ve done enough. I’d best get on.’
    ‘All arranged. Courtesy of my mother before she left for the shop. She’s taken a shine to you. If you don’t eat it there’ll be hell to pay.’
    I handed him his comb. ‘Do you do this for everyone who turns over?’
    He led the way onto the landing. ‘It’s my day off, so I can look after you.’
    We went down to the kitchen. Like the bathroom, huge by my standards, and shining with all mod cons. A scrubbed wood table in the centre was set with a lot more than the promised cheese and soup. There were thin slices of cold beef, demure on a plate; a tossed green salad, fetching in a wooden bowl; tomatoes, fruit, chunky brown bread; cans of beer; mugs for coffee that was percolating on an Aga stove, where the soup was simmering in a pan, a thick broth of vegetables.
    ‘Dig in,’ Barry said serving me a bowl of soup.
    No second invitation needed. Capsizing and Mrs G.’s bathing cure were hungering work.
    16/With one appetite being satisfied another surfaced.
    Curiosity.
    Who was this guy who rescued me from the sea and brought me home to be coddled by his mum and dressed me in his clothes and fed me in his kitchen?
    I had never met him before; he didn’t know me. Why was he doing all this? Out of the goodness of his heart? Pull the other one. Which one of the two? Was that what all this was