G03 - Resolution Read Online Free PDF Page A

tracksuits all the kids were wearing. Giving her age away, she drew brown, single-line arched eyebrows high on her forehead above the frames of her glasses like Joan Crawford. She sold bootlegged tapes of CD albums on a stall financed by her well-to-do son and played tapes on her ghetto blaster all day long. They were mediocre mainstream ballads and rock anthems, songs the listeners didn’t realize they loved until they heard them out of context, without the prejudice of packaging or association. Maureen and Leslie found themselves singing along to Jim Diamond, Queen and the Quo, knowing all the words, feeling uplifted until they realized who it was.
    Maureen and Leslie unfolded their little canvas picnic stools and sat, Maureen facing the entrance to the tunnel and Leslie the wheelie bin, watching for robbers. Leslie kept her sad-eye shades on to hide her sad eyes. Maureen gave them a squashed Regal each and took out her chrome oval lighter. The flint jammed and she had to pull the backside off the lighter, unscrew the spring and put the flint back in before she could get a light. The strip-down and rebuild took thirty seconds because she’d done it so often.
    Leslie kicked her ankle and made a sad face when she looked up. “Oh,” she said pathetically, “I think I’d feel a bit better if I had a fried-egg roll.”
    Maureen laughed. “You go,” she said. “I’m always going.”
    “But I’m having a trauma.”
    “So am I.”
    “What’s your trauma?”
    “My pal’s bossing me around.”
    “That’s not as sad as a relationship failure,” said Leslie.
    “It could result in a relationship failure,” said Maureen seriously.
    Leslie looked away wistfully. “If only someone cared.”
    Maureen stood up. “All right but you’re going tomorrow.”
    She was walking towards the mouth of the tunnel, checking her pocket for change, when a hand shot out and grabbed her roughly by the shoulder, spinning her round. Home Gran was behind her, peering down her bifocals. Maureen had never seen her so close up before. The puff of white hair had a yellow nicotine smudge at the front and the crosshatched wrinkles on her cheeks looked like dueling scars. Today she was modeling a beige tracksuit with black trim. “You,” she said and took Maureen’s hand. Surprisingly strong, she swung Maureen between the stalls to behind her tape counter, maneuvering her by twisting her wrist like a rudder. “You’ve got a degree, haven’t ye?”
    “Yeah,” said Maureen, “but it’s only in history of art.”
    “Don’t care about that.” Home Gran pointed Maureen onto a rickety kitchen stool, gave her a pen and an official-looking form. “I need this filled out.” It was a form to start a case in the small-claims court. The agile old woman squatted down to sit on the stall’s crossbar, five inches off the ground.
    “I haven’t got anything to lean on,” said Maureen.
    Home Gran reached underneath the stall and pulled out a rough scrap of hardboard. She had a bandage on her right hand, wrapped tightly around her wrist and her thumb.
    Maureen had never really had a conversation with Home Gran but she knew the other stallholders were wary of her. Peter and Lenny had told Leslie that Home Gran was a retired prostitute. Her son had been a scholarship boy at a posh private school. The Parish Mothers had organized a petition against the place going to her boy because she was a streetwalker but, to the school’s credit, they kept him on and he went to university and studied management, no less. Maureen had heard of Home Gran walloping light-fingered shoppers across the head with the lid of her change tray. Sometimes she did it to innocent young guys on suspicion, prompting widespread disapproval: no one would come to the market if they thought they might get battered just for looking. But it was a slow day and Maureen had nothing else to do but go outside and dodge the sunshine. “Okay, then,” she said, pulling the lid off the