Interpreters Read Online Free PDF Page A

stone hearth. We watched the marooned embers glow and die. The dogs whimpered and kicked in their sleep as they dreamed of rabbits and wide open spaces.
    ‘Thanks.’
    ‘I’m sorry I shouted. Very un-Steiner.’
    ‘It’s OK.’
    ‘I just wanted you to tell me that you know what I’m talking about. You were there , Max. In your previous incarnation as a quite normal person who didn’t wear fingerless gloves and who occasionally brushed his hair.’
    Max held out his still-gloved hands in a gesture of conciliation. ‘I do know what you’re talking about,’ he said gently.
    And I, as usual, felt ashamed. He was always the peacemaker, the good guy, the one who thought the best of everyone, even when all the evidence was there to suggest it would be very much wiser not to. He was the one who would hitch-hike through Europe and end up paying for the driver’s petrol. The one who would invite total strangers into his house with no fear of being macheted to death in his sleep. Who could never pass a beggar without giving them whatever he had on him. I remember, when he was about ten, he gave the remains of his Mars bar to a gypsy girl in Dublin. He didn’t notice the expression of scorn on her face, and I didn’t have the heart to mention it. Max never judged, never criticised. Not like me. Once, when we were walking to school together, and for a reason I can no longer remember, Iscreamed at him to shut up and drop dead. ‘Look around, and say that again,’ he said, calmly and a little sadly, nodding up at the top of a garden fence. There, caught in some raspberry netting and hanging lifeless from one spindly foot, was a thrush. It stared at me, its eye opaque and sunken. I kept quiet for a while after that.
    During the period that I most adored Max, I’d follow him wherever he went. He never objected when I insisted on accompanying him on his ‘Bob-a-Job’ missions round the estate. I somehow doubt that the Scout Association still encourages little boys in shorts to go into complete strangers’ houses and offer to do anything for them for five pence. It’s a shame, in a way. While Max polished the neighbours’ silver golfing trophies, weeded their flowerbeds or cleaned their shoes, I would sit drinking Ribena and eating squashed-fly biscuits off brightly coloured melamine plates, chattering about my rabbit or my current favourite book or TV programme to the housewives in their housecoats or floral pinnies.
    ‘And I wanted you to tell me that I’m doing it better. With Susanna,’ I said, hoping that his housemate Francesca – who didn’t seem able to take her eyes off Max whenever they were together (something Max denied vehemently when I pointed it out to him) – would stay in the kitchen a little longer, perfecting the meal that it was her turn to cook. ‘No, I don’t mean better. That sounds awful. Unfair. I don’t really know what I mean.’
    ‘You’re doing fine. Susanna’s a lovely child. Extraordinarily lovely, in fact. You know that.’
    ‘And now you’re supposed to say, “And you’re a great mother.”’
    ‘You don’t need me to tell you that.’
    ‘But I’d like you to.’
    ‘You’re doing absolutely fine. Though of course she’ll have inherited most of her finer points from her Uncle Max.’
    ‘Oh, yeah!’
    ‘Or her father.’
    ‘You don’t know anything about him.’
    ‘No, but I’d like to. As you know. And you do realise that Susanna is going to want to know, sooner or later?’
    ‘She might not.’
    ‘Oh, Julia,’ Max laughed as he walked over to the deep armchair in the corner of the room where Susanna was sleeping. He felt her forehead and stroked her blonde hair off her face. He pulled the blankets up to her chin. Then he came back to the fire and hugged me. His hair smelt of woodsmoke and winter sky. ‘You’re crazy.’
    ‘Hey,’ I said, looking over his shoulder at the mantelpiece. ‘A postcard. Where’s she gone this time?’
    He walked across the room