Frisky Business Read Online Free PDF

reading the market that bordered on the psychic. He became a prince among dealers, a legend in the company he worked for. He had made them a lot of money, and he had been rewarded accordingly. But then it had all melted away almost overnight and he was back to square one. It was as if the intervening years had never happened. Nothing had changed – except him.
    He looked around the room, and he didn’t recognise himself in it. It was a time capsule, stuffed with memorabilia and frozen in time somewhere in the late 1990s, and the only connection he felt with the objects in it was a nostalgic one – the movie posters of
Clerks
and
Kids
, the pin-ups of Kurt Cobain and Chloë Sevigny, the piles of home-made mixed tapes that he knew would be full of stuff by obscure indie bands, the song titles painstakingly scrawled in his spidery script on the cassette casings. It was like it all belonged to someone else, someone he had known long ago and who he thought of now with a sort of avuncular fondness. But he couldn’t go back to being that person again. He was no longer the boy he had been, and the man he had become couldn’t live here. It was an alien environment to him, a planet with no oxygen.
    His parents knew nothingabout the life he had lived in New York. They’d only seen the bits of it he’d wanted them to see when they came to visit for a holiday. It had been easy to keep up the pretence short-term, to eradicate the traces of his real life for a week or two. But how could he live with them on a daily basis without them discovering he’d been lying to them for years? It was impossible. He just had to find some way to make enough money to get back to New York as soon as he could.
    His self-pity fest was interrupted by a light tap on his door. ‘Come in,’ he called, sitting up and swinging his legs to the floor. His mother pushed open the door.
    ‘I’m just making a cup of tea, honey. Would you like one?’
    ‘No thanks.’
    ‘Okay. Well …’ She continued to hover uncertainly in the doorway, her eyes flitting around the room. ‘You might want to start unpacking those boxes.’
    ‘I will. I just haven’t got around to it yet.’
    ‘It’s been almost three weeks,’ she said tentatively.
    ‘I know.’ He took a deep breath, trying not to feel irritated. He knew she meant well, but she made him feel like a sulky teenager being told to tidy up his room.
    ‘I could help?’ she said. The question in her voice told him she was afraid of getting her head bitten off, and it made him feel guilty. He knew he’d been sulky and belligerent since he’d moved home, and that he’d generally behaved like an ungrateful sod. It wasn’t fair. After all, it wasn’t
her
fault that her son was such a loser.
    ‘No, I’ll do it myself – but thanks,’ he said, making a concerted effort not to snap at her.
    ‘You know, you can spread your stuff out in the house. You don’t have to put it all in this room. And we can change the decor,’ she said, moving into the room and sitting beside himon the bed. ‘Why don’t we go out at the weekend and you can pick out some things – our treat?’
    ‘Thanks, Mom, but I don’t want you to go to any expense.’
    ‘Don’t be a feckin’ eejit,’ she said, bumping her shoulder against his affectionately. He knew she just said it to make him laugh, and it worked. A native of Minnesota, his mother had lived in Ireland for over thirty years but had never lost her accent, and the many Irishisms she had picked up still sounded comically incongruous in her Midwestern twang.
    ‘Anyway, it doesn’t have to cost much. We can go to Ikea. This room is long overdue a makeover,’ she said looking around. ‘I’ve been meaning to do something with it for ages. Your being here will give me the kick in the butt I need to get on with it.’
    ‘Really, Mom, don’t do it on my account. It’s just until I sort myself out …’
    She sighed. ‘I know you think this is just temporary,