How to Disappear Read Online Free PDF Page A

stare up perplexedly at the speakers as though trying to work out how the awful noise got up there.
    Gozo’s relative treelessness means that the salt air carries right across the island and when it isn’t hot this makes the air clammy and chill. There is consequently a stickiness to the bedcover over which I am this afternoon extending my limbs, with a bunch of pillows at the head, reading Pope’s The Rape of the Lock while, between verses, I fitfully consider my solitary state…There is nothing to worry about. Which can sometimes induce a free-fall vertigo because worries are the banisters of life. But at present, no free fall. Thoughts and impressions pass through me in leisurely, comprehensible chains of reflection. Yet the very blankness of the worry sheet supplies a surface on which a fine seismic needle can now and again scratch a distant unease and it takes mere moments to realise that this unease derives from the frowning one. In a busier world I’d not notice it – or him – but here… well, I suppose without unease there can be no adventure. Unease is the awareness of exposure, of possibility, that something else might happen. Unease brings alertness – which means that Gozo is not bland. The couple next door appear to have left. I am now the hotel’s only guest. I wonder if I shall be the only person in the building when they close up at night. I do hope not. From the balcony the garden looks dull and damp. I come back in and give the book on the bed a shove with my knee. A shudder passes between my shoulderblades. I look round, and again I look round. My pulse quickens. Suddenly I am anxious.
    The island still has a touch of what the Mediterranean had before tourism hit it, a self-sufficient character which is intimately connected to its drawbacks. Don’t moan so much about the food. Good food demands a more aggressive culture. And if British rule must take some responsibility for the dreadfulness of the food, it can also take some for the probity of the population, both features being untypical of the southern world. Gozo will do you no violence. Even the dogs are gentler than Sicilian dogs. And I haven’t seen a single beggar here, nor on Malta, not a single one. As I’m reminding myself of all this, a church bell begins to toll, not a carillon jangle but a bell single and sweet, and I feel the fear seep out of me. With every successive clang I am calmed. Surely the point of religion is to present existence in a positive light and to keep evil spirits in check. But religion doesn’t do that. It emphasises our failings, our sins, our worthlessness, the ghastly destiny which awaits those who do not obey. Heaven becomes absurdly remote, nirvana an impossibility except via tortuous paths. Nearly all theology is a form of nightmare. But a few sweet things do sometimes come through. The lighting of a candle for example. Or the beauty of a quiet old building when the inane squeal of theology is stoppered. Or the sound of this single bell. It is now 10.45 pm and stepping on to the balcony I see a cross of golden lightbulbs on top of a church, greeting me over the roofs of the town, including me, embosoming me, piercing the circumference of the self so that any lingering fretfulness leaks away and I flow in a larger, more benign rhythm. This I believe is what is meant by communion. I fire up the water-heater and run a scalding bath. On this night I sleep very well.
    Thus far the rain has held off but the Easter weather is not good. On Saturday powerful gales drive across the island from the direction of Greece and the sky is skidding lead. At Ramla Bay, shielded by shrubbery, Gregory says ‘I’m sorry about the weather’ in his carefully modulated Harvard voice, as though the climate were his personal responsibility.
    â€˜It’s OK. It makes it like Cornwall,’ I say. ‘Will you swim?’
    â€˜This very second.’
    He peels off his