How to Disappear Read Online Free PDF

knitted salmon skin and totters down the sand into a heavy sea, a fragile but somehow protected figure. One does not fear for him. Periodically his head becomes visible; occasionally a flailing arm. Five minutes later he’s staggering back up the beach, murmuring ‘Oh God…oh God…’
    â€˜Isn’t it dangerous?’
    â€˜Yes. This sort of weather can generate a terrific current in the bay like a fast-flowing river. But I know where to go, along by those rocks.’
    â€˜Those mucky rocks. I was reading The Rape of the Lock and –’
    â€˜I love that bit at the end,’ he says, ‘about the birth of a comet. The heavens bespangling with dishevelled light…’
    His quotation so charms me that I forget what I was myself going to say about the poem, and mention instead that ‘I thought I’d drive over to Marsalforn and check it out. Would you like to come?’
    â€˜That’s kind of you. But I’m waiting for someone. In fact he may not turn up, but I’ll wait anyway, in case he does.’
    Over at Marsalforn, Gozo’s main and shabby tourist resort, the sea is in magnificent uproar. Waves crash across the promenade and girls shriek with delight at the rocketing douches. Young bloods cruise slowly in dilapidated fuckmobiles and a large party of London school-children, wearing dayglo clothes and with sharp haircuts, gossip furiously in a café – their animation marking them out as not local.
    At teatime the rain arrives, sluicing the island without pause. Back at the hotel a mothers’ meeting is going on in the Cotswold bar among a caterwaul of babies. Big Bertha waves to me from the dining-room. She is doing her best to be a waitress but ‘grace under pressure’ is not a characteristic of hers. On her way to the kitchen she asks ‘How is Princess Diana?’
    â€˜Very well thank-you.’
    â€˜But they say she is sad in the newspaper.’
    â€˜Yes, I think she is.’
    â€˜You know her?’
    â€˜No, I don’t know her.’
    â€˜But you have met her?’ she asks, with a forward, beseeching movement of her shoulders, as though to be with one who’s been with the Princess Diana would bestow a rosy light.
    â€˜I’m afraid not. But she once sat behind us at a Tina Turner concert.’
    â€˜We love Diana.’
    Ah, yes, the Princess – it is remarkable how so many people whom Diana has never met, and does not know, have intimate and rewarding relations with her. I think even her enemies in England find themselves helplessly excited and gilded by the fact that the most glamorous woman on the planet is English and that in consequence our whole society there is lifted up a little more by the world’s attention. I’d been with my friend Von at that Tina Turner concert – one of Tina Turner’s numerous ‘farewell’ concerts – it was at Woburn Abbey – and Princess Diana is probably the only woman alive who could have upstaged Tina. But she did it in the most bashful way, arriving unaccompanied except for bodyguards, giving a self-deprecating little wave when she was picked out by a spotlight as she took her seat, to a huge cheer of appreciation from the audience. One of the detectives sat on Von’s left, and turning to him she said ‘Di’s the first royal to show her knees’ (the detective replied ‘Is that so, love?’).
    The hotel owner’s son is also in the bar, babyfying, and I tell him how I’ve fallen in love with his hotel.
    â€˜Oh good,’ he replies, ‘and it will be even better soon.’
    â€˜What do you mean, better?’
    â€˜We will develop.’
    I go cold. ‘Develop?’
    â€˜The bank won’t lend us money for improvement unless we become a four-star hotel and the Government won’t give us four stars unless we do the improvement – so to get the loan we must demolish the