Green Grass Read Online Free PDF

her tracks, leaning on a tree to laugh. Wiping her eyes she begins to walk back across towards South End Green and her car, smiling and nodding when she passes the ethereal blonde, now throwing a pink ball to her three Labradors. Dog walkers are friendly, they appear to have untrammelled lives, and this attracts Laura. To find pleasure in the gloss on a dog’s coat, or to laugh as it rushes up to you with a stick to throw, are easy versions of happiness, and Laura responds gladly.
    Back in the car, with five messages listed on her mobile phone, and all of them from Inigo, she stops smiling and punches in the studio number. Sometimes Inigo’s search for truth and purity is too much like hard work.

Chapter 3
    The promise of the morning has given way to spitting rain by the time Laura reaches Whitechapel, and clouds like bruises hang low across the street, vying with the watery February sun to create a vivid 1950s film-set light. Laura hums ‘Singin’ in the Rain’ and parks outside the tombstone shop, noticing as she does so that they have changed their window display to include an arresting slab of skewbald marble and next to it a small, pig-shaped stone bearing the words:
    With our deepest sympathies the grandchildren
    Wondering what, if any, phrase, might have sounded less incongruous with a pig-shaped headstone, Laura crosses the road to the building which houses the studio. The entrance is obscured by scaffolding and today by a large white van into which dusty-booted men are piling the contents of the studio aboveInigo’s. Out comes a purple velvet sofa, a mannequin wearing nothing but a tutu, and a giant pink mule. Could any of the passers-by guess the nature of the business run from the studio by its office furnishing? Laura doubts it. None of the passers-by ever raise their heads from contemplation of the pavement, let alone look up high enough to see what is going on around them. As if to prove her point, two youths pass, both walking fast, one with his hands in his pockets, the other speaking into a mobile phone; both have their heads down and their eyes on the toes of their white trainers, blind to what lies ahead of them. Naturally, they walk straight into the purple velvet sofa.
    Laura shrugs herself into the warm shell of her coat, hugely enjoying the street tableau this morning. The youths hardly miss a stride; they bounce off the sofa and walk on, with not a flicker of a glance up, no apology, no communication, not even a small, complicit laugh. The second one’s phone rings as he passes Laura, so close that she can smell the musky waft of his aftershave mixed with tobacco. He answers it, and continues down the street beside his friend, both talking to people somewhere else, both unheeding of where they are, living internal lives.
    Laura’s own phone rings as she ascends the stairs. It is Inigo.
    â€˜Where are you? We’ve got trouble with the press in New York.’
    â€˜I’m on my way up the stairs.’
    â€˜Good. I’ll see you in a minute.’
    Wishing away the sinking sensation in her stomach, Laura opens the door. She is in the studio in time to see Inigo utter these words and to hear him in stereo, although it is not easy to hear him at all as a lachrymose singer is wailing through a Bartok aria at full volume on the sound system.
    â€˜Here I am,’ Laura mouths, hanging her coat behind the door and advancing towards him; he hardly pauses to greet her, but continues to pace up and down in the centre of the room. He is in a state, Laura notes apprehensively.
    Inigo has a single bicycle wheel in one hand, and he is playing with it as he walks restlessly to and fro, bouncing the wheel down to the floor and up again, spinning it over and over so the spokes catch the light and glitter, blurring together to form a flat disc of liquid silver. Inigo collects the separate components of bicycles: wheels, saddles, frames, handle bars and gear mechanisms, and