If Nobody Speaks of Remarkable Things Read Online Free PDF Page B

boy outside, they look at each other and they hurry away down the road, and when they turn the corner the street is empty and quiet again.
    The street is empty and quiet and still, the light is brightening, shadows hardening, the haze of dawn burning away. The day will soon burn with a particular brightness, hot and lethargic and tense. Later, it will rain, hard, suddenly, and the hot tarmac will steam and shine as water streaks across the surface into the gutters. And windows will be hurriedly closed, and people will stand in doorways, in shocked silences. But now, in this early beginning, it is dry, and the street is beginning to warm, and people sleep, or lie restlessly awake, or make love and sleep again.

Chapter 5
    The day after speaking to Sarah I tried telling my mother.
    I took the phone into my room, I sat on the floor with my knees pulled up into my chest and I started to dial the number.
    I looked at a photograph on the wall, taken that summer, taken a few days before it happened.
    Half a dozen of us, huddled together in a front garden, ashtrays and cushions spread across the grass, a speaker mounted in the front-room window, a beanbag spilling its beans across the pavement.
    It’s a photo that makes us look young, it makes all of us look very young.
    Our faces taut and shining, grinning awkwardly, squinting into the sunlight, everyone’s arms around everyone else.
    Waving cans of beer as though they were novelties.
    Looking like we thought everything was going to last forever.
    I put the phone down before it started ringing, and I looked at the other pictures.
    The photo of Simon must have been taken the same day, the day he left.
    He’s sat in the front passenger seat of his dad’s car, window wound down, waving.
    His dad’s at the back of the car, leaning all his weight on the boot, trying to get it closed against three years’ worth of possessions.
    Against duvets and pillows, a stereo, a television, books and magazines and folders full of notes.
    Against plates, saucepans, cutlery, a shoebox full of halffinished condiments, a food processor with the attachments missing.
    A box of CDs, a box of videos, a box full of photographs and postcards and letters.
    And a standard lamp, which he bought in a junk shop to make his room look civilised, lunging over his shoulder from the mess behind him.
    All of it squeezed into his dad’s car, and he sits there and smiles and holds his open hand up beside his face.
    In the background there’s a boy on a tricycle, staring.
    There’s a photo of me and another girl, Alison, and I can’t remember who took it.
    I’m standing next to her, pointing, shocked and laughing, and I’m surprised to see how similar I look, really, the same short blonde hair, the same small square glasses.
    Alison’s pulling a wideopen face at the camera, freshly studded tongue flaring out of her mouth, fingers curled out like cat-claws.
    And I’m pointing at her tongue and looking right into the lens, looking right out at myself these few years later, with a telephone in my hand, unable to dial.
    I sat there thinking about the day she’d got it done, talked into it by the boy with the ring through his eyebrow who lived in her house, how she kept changing her mind all morning.
    Eventually she went to a place round the corner, an upstairs place with a sign on the door saying no children no spectators.
    It was a week before she could speak properly again, and then all she talked about was how excited and pleased she was with it.
    She kept sticking her tongue out at men in the pub, just to see how they’d react.
    By the end of the summer she was saying she might have to take it out to get a job.
    It was a strange time.
    People were slipping out of the city unexpectedly, like children getting lost in a crowd, leaving nothing but temporary addresses and promises to keep in touch.
    I didn’t know what to do, there was a feeling of time running out and a loss of momentum, of opportunities