Little Fingers! Read Online Free PDF Page B

for serial adultery, our hope that our
parents will die so that we can inherit all the money from the sale
of their four-bedroomed detached house, our wish that our children
would up and leave us at the ages of 28 and 24, our almost
irresistible urge to pick up a shotgun and shoot all those people
who really annoy us.
    Actually,
maybe what they would mostly discover is how nice we are. They
would find earnest, generous thoughts. There is a strong desire in
us all to do our best for everyone. When the person next to us is
in trouble, we want to help. Social rules often discourage us from
doing so, but we really do want to drag the person out of their
mire, at some considerable personal inconvenience.
    Take mothers
and their children. I am not a mother. I will never be a mother. I
am not cut out for it. However, I have watched them. The amount of
worry the average mother gets through in a day planning how her
children can have a pleasant, invigorating, rewarding, educational
24 hours! And that is the tip of the iceberg. Mothers strategise
every few minutes as to how their children can develop, and grow,
and find fulfilment and happiness over a whole lifetime. Whenever
anything goes wrong for their children, their first concern is
whether the mishap hurts now and how it can be remedied, but the
very next thought is how this incident might blight their
children's entire lives. After this, will they ever be the same
again? They are constantly searching for things that will change
their children's fortunes for the better, and dreading those that
will change them for the worse.
    Men are not
like that, even the house-husband types. They are generally baffled
watching this stream of uncertainty flow through their partners.
They are more physically aloof, but that is not it. Men simply
worry less about people, themselves and others. They have more of a
sense of the transitory nature of the world. Things will go wrong.
Things will go right. You cannot have the ups without the downs.
Women worry about people. Men worry about finances.
     
    * *
*
     
    You must, by
now, be wondering if I will ever get to the point when I arrived in
Hanburgh, and still more whether I will give my side of what
happened there.
    Allow a woman
to tease you, Inspector, and to tease out the real truth for
herself. We women are wilful creatures, especially in front of a
willing audience.
    The answer is
yes, definitely, I will tell you all, and it is all just about to
begin.
    I came to
Hanburgh for one reason only. I became very, very rich. Less than
five years after I had been virtually annihilated as a person, I
became a super-person, someone who no longer cares about the rules,
or the consequences. I can afford them all.
    I do not
suppose you know what it is like to be exceptionally rich. You have
no doubt met such people, and found us either exceptionally decent
or exceptionally arrogant. I flatter myself that my wealth did not
change me much. I was always both.
    The secret of
my wealth is no secret. I invested every penny I could get my hands
on in a market as it swept up like a tsunami wave, and I bailed out
before it crashed into all those high rise buildings lining the
beach, killing everyone still aboard or in its way.
    I remember
just sitting back and watching the numbers whizzing round. And such
large numbers, bigger and bigger every time I looked at them. I sat
there laughing helplessly, the uncontrollable giggling of the
supremely lucky. How can anyone have had this much luck? I was not
even anywhere near the richest woman alive. What must she feel
like, no doubt many years on from me? Was she still feeling lucky,
or bored, or angry, or euphoric about the world? Where would I be
by then?
    Of course, I
know the answer by now - bemused, and disassociated, out of the
swim of humanity, sidelined, alienated, afraid to lose what I have,
and to be lost in what I have. I am about ready to complain to some
young person in a bar about the burdens of wealth. Oh