Falling Sideways Read Online Free PDF

probably have brought himself to do that – someone, for example, with half a brain, or ten per cent more backbone than a pint of custard – but not David. Telling lies is a bit like tiling bathrooms – if you don’t know how to do it properly, it’s best not to try. He pulled out the carton lid, wrote his number down on a corner, tore it off and handed it over. ‘I’ll be hearing from you, then,’ he said.
    â€˜Yup.’
    I’ll just go home and wait, then, shall I? (he wanted to say). And when you phone, I’ll drop by and collect my brand new artificially synthesised human being – actually, ‘human’ is probably pushing it a bit, or at the very least it’s a grey area; but that’s OK. While I’m waiting I can watch a video, or maybe make a start on my quarterly VAT return—
    â€˜Okay,’ David said. ‘Well, thanks for everything.’
    Honest John shrugged and turned a shoulder towards him, implying that he’d now become a slight nuisance and this wasn’t a waiting room or a bus shelter. David smiled feebly, thought about waving, decided not to, and walked out.
    Outside – in a way it was like waking up out of a dream, the moment when the screwy dream logic melts and falls away and you realise that none of that weird stuff could ever possibly have happened. He walked thirty yards down the street, stopped, and reached inside his jacket. Under the amber light of the street lamp, the writing on the carton lid still said recd on a/c 1 cloan £4617 ; and today’s date, and a squiggle. He very much wanted to throw it away; but he came from a society and a culture that throws away receipts about as often as it drowns unwanted kittens in steaming cauldrons of mulled yoghurt. He put it back in his pocket and walked to the Tube station.
    The train was unusually slow, both in arriving and in taking David home. He stopped at the Kentucky Fried Chicken place on his way back to the flat. On the doormat he found a bank statement, an invitation to join the Aerospace Design Book Club, a postcard of the Gettysburg battlefield from his friends Steven and Tamsin (he hadn’t even realised they’d gone abroad) and a road fund licence-renewal form for the car he’d sold seven years ago. He put the bank statement in the shoebox marked ‘Bank Statements’ and binned the rest.
    There were six messages on his answering machine. Five of them were just clicks and buzzes. The sixth was from his unbearable cousin Alex, the lawyer, instructing David to meet him for lunch tomorrow. David sighed. He’d known and hated Alex since he was six and Alex was eight, and had been trying to get rid of him for as long as he could remember. But, for some reason, Alex seemed to like him and made a point of staying in touch, no matter how hard David tried to elude him. This tenacity always made him think of a cat his mother had owned at one stage, who had insisted on bringing its newly slain prey into the house and depositing the corpses in places where they’d be sure to be found eventually – behind sofa cushions or inside slippers. No amount of reasoning, yelling or violence had ever managed to persuade this cat that its contributions to the household economy were neither necessary nor welcome. What made it worse, of course, was that Alex was a successful, well-paid, highly respected lawyer with a junior partnership in a prestigious West End firm and parents who were proud of him, whereas David was still just a successful, well-paid, highly respected computer geek whose mother told her friends he stacked shelves in Safeways for a living because she couldn’t bring herself to admit to the shameful reality. Alex was also blue-eyed, curly-haired, good-looking in a Hugh Grant sort of way, and a Tall Bastard. Everything else was forgivable, assuming a proper level of sincere contrition. The height thing, on the other hand, went way beyond