Jake's Long Shadow Read Online Free PDF Page B

basis by suggesting you cut your smoking in half. Well, did you?
    For a start I did. (Effin’ school teacher.)
    For a start?
    Yeah, well, it’s hard to cut down (hard to do anything self-disciplined). Haven’t you ever been a smoker?
    Yes, I
was
a smoker, Sharneeta. And yes it
was
hard to quit. But I did quit. And in case you hadn’t noticed, the sign says car dealer, not social counsellor.
    Whoa, this dude was a changed man altogether. Out in his true colours, being green for money and g for greed. How I saw it.
    Listen, he said on another of his sighs. I tell my kids, if you want something badly, then it comes with a responsibility, which is to pay for it. You understanding me, Sharneeta?
    Arsehole knew my car meant everything. (Especially the radio. The different worlds it gives you, just a small movement of tuning dial. I even listen, once in a while, to classical stuff. Not that I get it, but have had a moment or two of getting something.) Okay, pal. Thanks for nothing. I’ll keep the payments up.
    My pleasure, the bastard just had to have the last, smiling word.
    Well, I faced up to that one responsibility at least, own the car now and here I am listening to Radio Pacific, the talkback station. Shit, listen to ’em: endless line-up of idiots, losers and weirdoes. Or lonely old-age pensioners ringing up talking about their ailing health or singing a song in a creaky voice, or reading a terrible poem over the air, reliving their irrelevant pasts. The lonely, the strange, and bigots, rednecks, brown-necks and no-necks, all having their say on life when, really, I know they’re saying it confuses them, it confounds, and most of all it hurts. I know confusion, I know hurt. Just the callers keep you from knowing why they’re the way they are.
    This life, their lousy, miserable place in it, hurts so bad they’re angry all the time. Hurts so much it warps their thinking and they blame everyone and everything else for their failures. Least I don’t do that. I’m just a failure and that’s it. No one’s fault, maybe not even my own. If there is a kind of blame, I figure it’s to do with way back in the past that can’t ever be changed; no incident, no experience can ever be undone, no matter how bad, how awful it was. It’s like a game you lost; why they say: Get over it, honey. (Except I can’t. I can’t.) I once read this poem by accident in a newspaper, by some dude whose photograph drew me to his work. One line hit me like a train:
How could I fight a damage unknown when childhood’s murderous seed was sown?
    Man, all the lights went on. I was shaken to the core. But then I thought, oh well, someone else knows what true misery is like: it’s not about fighting it, taking it head on.
    And here she is, Ms Misery, out in farmer country. Kind of free if only the friggin’ darkness would ease up. You can hardly see their houses here as they’re tucked back behind trees off the main road, don’t know why they wouldn’t wanna show them off to the world ’cos the peeks you get say some are pretty big houses — homes, I think they call ’em. They live quietly, modestly, satisfied, un-lost here; they’re free in the open air, working free, with free meat, ground to grow their own vegies, a lot of them I’d say on inherited land. All this and making money on top of it. Who wouldn’t be satisfied with that? Though one of my flatmates is a farmer’s son and I don’t see any sign of an inheritance, no land, no class, nor satisfaction with anything, not Alistair. That silly girlfriend of his runs around after his every whining beck and call. That’s one son of a farmer who fell through the cracks.
    Lookee, there’s one, got his young kid up front on one a them three-wheelers I seen on TV ads. Forget what they advertise (try three-wheelers, Sharns). The kid is proud as punch, look at the little critter