Hemispheres Read Online Free PDF Page B

But there was something
     taut about her these days, skin stretched too tight over the bones.
    What’s going on, Gaz?
    She looked at Jonah.
    What are you doing here?
    Jonah grinned and raised his palms. Hagan’s face flowered into an idiot smile.
    There’s glass on the floor, she said.
    Hagan dived beneath the bar for dustpan and brush. Jonah had gone, left the door gently vibrating behind him. I pushed out
     into the street where the rain had stopped and there he was, leaning against the pole of the traffic lights, hands thrust
     into his pockets. I let a taxi glide past and jogged across to him.
    Have we got any more business? he said. Red light flushed across his face from above, gave him the bulbous glow of a Halloween
     apple. I kicked the kerb, hard.
    I don’t know what to do.
    Yeah you do.
    How do I start?
    Find out who was there with him. There must be some of them who came back. His mates.
    But how can I trace them?
    Did he have a diary or owt? Somewhere he wrote down names and numbers and that?
    Aye. Come to think of it he did have this old address book.
    Do you reckon it’s still lying around somewhere? Back of a drawer, up in the attic?
    Dunno. It might be.
    There you go then.
    Jonah beamed. Above him the lights changed and green light flooded across his face. Molten sunlight dripping through new leaves,
     transforming him into a mischievous satyr.
    Upstairs in the box room and you don’t need to switch on the light because the orange gloaming of Teesside and the gas flares
     on Billingham are beaming back off the cloudbase and the hangover kicking in behind your eyeballs. Yan clumping up the stairs
     in them steelcappedboots and the little click at each step from the tendon in his ankle. Yan dead on the Falklands, white shinbones in the peat.
     Ghosts of probability. Alive. Dead. Alive. Dead. Alive.
    Put your hand down on the bedspread with the bitten-down nails and tell yourself it’s real and solid.

3 . Wilson’s Storm Petrel
(Oceanites oceanicus)
    I put my hand down on the wheel and look at the white flesh and bitten-down nails just to convince myself I’m real and solid.
     The wheelhouse door is swinging on its hinges, yawning open at the top of a crest and slamming shut in the guts of the following
     trough. And the weather gets worse, wind, spray and rain streaming across the open deck and bursting against the glass.
    Can’t make headway, yells Fabián Rodriguez. The weather full in our face. He moves the dials of the radio and the static howls
     and pops. Horse Boy curled on the floor in the foetal position with that coverless paperback up close to his coupon. Lips
     moving soundlessly.
    South Georgia, says Joe Fish, hunkered down over the charts, his pocked face glowering from wet oilskins. We can sit it out
     there, in the lee of the island. Head back west when the weather clears.
    Fuck me, a sentence without profanity, I mock. Aren’t there Marines down there?
    The imminence of death smartens up the tongue, he counters. They’re at Grytviken only, I think. And it’s a big island – a
     hundred miles long.
    South Georgia, I say, shaking my head. What do you reckon Joe? Reckon there’s another reality where I lost that hand, and
     right now the redcaps are getting started on me?
    Pure shite, he says.
    But chance is the breath of the universe marra. It’s what keeps us sharp, eh?
    No such thing as chance, he says. If you wound the world right back to the beginning and set it all off again, them cards
     would still come out the same. Every time.
    I give him a slap round the chops, nice and gentle like.
    That slap was predestined, I tell him. Nowt I could do about it.
    Dave smells of sick, slumped on the bench seat with his mouth gaping. Wishing he never came along, I daresay.
    Hang on, so who’s Dave? He was a civvy, right?
    Aye, he certainly wasn’t a fucking para with that kite on him. Nah, he was hiding out at Berkeley when the rest of us pitched
     up.
    Fabián as well?
    Yep. The