Fallout Read Online Free PDF

the shots, saw patterns in the cuts and felt the shape of the story like music. Then he would watch them again. The physical world shrank. His inner horizon took scale. He bought a television and his father, at first suspicious, quite soon became attached to it; falling asleep to the national anthem each night and waking to the high-pitched closedown shriek. Luke caught him staring at it after he switched it off, sucking the last of the life from the fading white dot as the screen went black.
    When Luke watched the television he sat with his knees to his chest, as close to the flickering static-furred glass as he could get. He watched all the plays on the BBC, wrote down the names of the playwrights and transposed the dialogue in a high-speed scrawl, not looking at the page.
    And the songs, the songs – there was a party going on somewhere and he wasn’t at it. He ran down the batteries on his radio late at night, looking for anything that had even half the energy that he had. Every week he heard something that broke the week before into pieces, music that was splitting its skin with every hour; growing up and getting younger. The Who, Them, The Stones, The Kinks, Aretha Franklin, James Brown, Bob Dylan. Bob Dylan. He hadn’t known pop music could grow up like that. He hadn’t known there was a mind so big in it. He bought all the records he could afford, watching the vinyl and the labels, the spinning words the right way up – angled – upside down. All the way round at 45rpm. The life inside him was tearing him up; writing himself inside out in lined-paper notebooks, rushing and looking and working and moving but knowing all the time that he was just staying still.
    He wore a narrow black tie and white shirt. He greased his hair back, he let it grow, he grew sideburns, he shaved them off, he washed the grease out, he cut his hair, he grew it again. He got a job on Saturday nights at the working men’s club that had bands play once a week between the bingo and the comic, fighting off every would-be pop star and Romeo in Seston to get it and, when he did, he felt as if God’s hand had pointed down and His great voice had said, Yes, Lucasz Kanowski, you will work behind a bar and you will meet girls and there will be music . . . And he did. And there was. Most of the music was very bad because Seston wasn’t exactly a major stop-off on the touring circuit; it even knew itself that it was a pathetic, half-dead place. But if the music wasn’t up to much the girls were easy harmony. Almost all girls had something about them that sang. They smelled the same – hairspray and mentholated cigarettes, thick perfumed lipstick. Jill, Sheila, Sandra, Mavis; tough girls who took care of themselves, made sure he knew he mustn’t do anything , but then always made sure he did; wanting the heat of what they ought not do – and no babies. Christ knew Luke didn’t want babies either and he found ways of doing everything but the one thing they both wanted, taking Catholic pleasure in the ache of holding back. He had to be ingenious. He was. He used his imagination in the toilets of the club, in the alley behind his house, at the bus stop near theirs, in front gardens, back gardens, on buses and on benches, and discovered that the thrill of female pleasure, like a blessing, was enough to still the constant seeking frenzy of his mind so there was no mill office next day, no asylum, no father, no mother, just that girl, her heat and smiling whispered refusals – could he get this far, this, this – until it was over and he was left alone; satisfied if she was brave enough to touch him back or frustrated if she wasn’t and, like a cold rain falling, the truth of his life would return to him.
    He got another pay rise.
    He went through a phase of switching his accent at work every day to see if anyone in the mill office would notice. He jumped from French to Polish to Lincolnshire to extreme upper class but the only nickname that