Frankie Styne & the Silver Man Read Online Free PDF Page B

Once a day the family would be together the way other people’s were. Except that she herself rarely sat down to eat it, and Liz’s father said that eating so early upset him.
    â€˜Would you prefer me to make our tea after closing time?’ she’d ask—for such questions she often used her softest, sweetest voice—as she set the plate before him. He picked; Liz cleared hers rapidly. They talked as if she were intermittently invisible. She stared at the wall, feeling what it would be like if it were she who decided when.
    Occasionally Liz’s mother would take her aside and whisper that she was sorry that everything was dreadful and she was so bad tempered, but she was hounded to it. When they got out of pubs, she promised, things would be different: everything. But it didn’t seem to happen. Clutched between her mother’s arms and knees, the soft words tickling at her ears, was, Liz grew to feel, something like being embraced by a vampire who charmed her victim into the first deadly kiss.
    â€˜If I help you in the bar, I haven’t much choice but to leave her watching TV for hours on end. The rest of the kids in her class can already read.’
    â€˜She doesn’t seem to mind,’ her father said, adding, ‘I was a late reader. It’s not the end of the world.’ After this the silence ached.
    I’m glad I’m raised on TV, Liz thought. Everything her parents said was dull and flat and had been said often before. There was no music, just the scrape of spoons in bowls, the clash of knives and forks in the sink as her mother washed up from the first course. No special effects, no real fights with blood and laser guns and flashing lights, no last-minute escapes; no one won and nothing ever changed. As soon as Liz was finished, she could leave the table. Without television, she thought she would die.
    â€˜How long?’ Liz’s mother said abruptly one day. ‘I never expected this, you know.’
    â€˜How long what?’
    â€˜Until—’
    â€˜When we get to the new pub, we should be able to take on help,’ her father would say. When that had proved itself several times wrong, he’d come up with another idea. ‘My mother could come and live with us. She could help out. Not in the bar—I mean company, for the kid.’
    â€˜But she can’t look after her own self!’ Liz’s mother said, her gloved hands steaming. ‘What help is she going to be?’ Nonetheless, Grammy had come to the Black Swan.
    And because the television was kept in Grammy’s bedroom, sanctions against it were obviously aimed at both of them. Watching secretly with the volume right down drew them even closer together. Mostly you could get the story, even without the words and sound.
    â€˜Means we can talk at the same time,’ Grammy said, her eyes fixed straight ahead, pupils wide—that, of course, was the Silver Lining. By then it had become a habit. They found them for each other automatically and only noticed if one wasn’t there. Liz sat next to Grammy on the bed in the dark watching the pictures move. Sometimes they sucked sherbet lemons as the watched. If she ever thought of the rest of her life, Liz just imagined it going on like that. In her infatuation and outrage Liz didn’t at the time see the irony, nor believe, as her mother had warned, that one day the chickens would come home to roost.
    The chickens were brochures for old people’s homes. They flapped their way through the letterbox and then landed clumsily one by one in a dead heap. Liz’s parents had agreed to avoid the tie that bound them to Grammy. It was impossible, they both declared, to run a pub and a nursing home at the same time. There was, for a while, peace between them. Perhaps it was the desire to avoid being seen as a hypocrite which made Grammy sign the forms without complaint. And perhaps she did purposely choose Christmas Day to die