Happy Valley Read Online Free PDF Page A

wrists.
    What about girls? asked Hagan, licking the flap of the cigarette.
    Yes, there’s girls, said Chuffy.
    What sort of girls?
    Same as most places I suppose. All sorts of girls.
    Oh.
    Chuffy Chambers did not like to talk about girls, because they were a sort of unrealized ambition with him, and even if they said, Chuffy, you play the accordion so good, they never said more than that. They laughed. They said he was loopy. Though he treated his mother well, he was a good boy, Chuffy, but—well, he wasn’t quite all there, and you couldn’t treat him altogether serious because of that, or go with him or anything like that. So Chuffy Chambers always squinted and felt embarrassed when anyone spoke about girls. He felt a hot sensation inside his shirt next to the holy medals and the sacred hearts. For Chuffy was religious, he was a Catholic. When Father Purcell came from Moorang to Happy Valley he went to Mrs Chambers’ for tea, and it made you feel good to have a priest in the house. It was a great consolation to be religious. The Protestants called him a Micky, but he didn’t mind. It gave him a kind of secret superiority over the other boys who went with girls, and when things got too bad he told himself he didn’t want to go with girls, it was bad, he touched the holy medals and told himself it was wrong.
    Like most places, eh? Yes, I suppose you’re right.
    Men who work a lot in the open, especially men who work with sheep, have a habit of repeating things, even trivial things, several times, perhaps because conversation is scarce and it gives them a sense of company to have a phrase coming out of their mouths, even if the phrase is already stated. Clem Hagan was like this. He repeated a remark ponderously, sometimes with a different intonation just for variety’s sake. He stared out in front of him with an expression that might have been interesting if you didn’t know it was due to his having spent most of his life looking into the distance for sheep. Anyone who stares long enough into the distance is bound to be mistaken for a philosopher or mystic in the end. But Hagan was no philosopher, that is, he searched no farther than the immediate, sensual reality, and this translated into simpler terms meant a good steak with juice running out at the sides and blonde girls with comfortable busts.
    He had the immense self-confidence of men who are successful in their sensuality. If you saw him walking, he walked slowly with his legs a little apart and his arms a little bent and the trousers tight across his behind. Or when he smiled there was a bit of gold in one of his front teeth that flashed, and they liked that. He only had to lean up against a bar and smile and they were ducking about behind the bottles, yes, Mr Hagan and no, Mr Hagan, and pouring out whisky when it should have been gin. Everything happened so easily. He tilted his hat over his eyes. He wore his hat perpetually on a tilt which made him look rather lazy, as if he had had too much, and you were just a moment too late, a pity, but there it was, and openingyour mouth and breathing hard wouldn’t help matters at all.
    Hagan sighed. He was getting cramp in his legs. His trousers were catching him in the crutch. And he wanted to make water too. There was no end to the yellow pasty road. In the back of the truck, if you could judge by the jangle, the incubator had come into permanent conjunction with the separating machine. There was the hell of row, and the country going on and on, it was how many miles, mean and sour, there was probably fluke in the sheep, and he did not know why he had come. She said her name was Bella, that red-haired one. She had a behind like a cart-horse, wicker-patterned, after sitting in that wicker chair drinking a gin and ginger beer. She said she got the wind awful bad, but she just loved ginger beer, and wasn’t it funny the way it got sticky on your fingers, she said. She liked ginger ale too, but didn’t it prickle up