Love + Hate Read Online Free PDF Page A

say it now, please,’ she said. ‘For God’s sake!’
    ‘Okay, okay.’
    ‘Okay?’ she said.
    ‘Go!’ he said.
    ‘Right, thanks,’ she said. ‘At last. You made a decision.’
    ‘Go, go!’ he said.
    ‘Good,’ she said. ‘Go!’
    And they went.
    He started first, taking a few careful paces to try his knees, only to see her hare off, flying past him, and turning the corner a few yards away. Soon she was out of sight.
    He kept to his plan; he was slow, as he had intended, conserving his energy for the final fifteen-minute burst. Turning the first corner himself, he slowed down even more. He’d felt a tightening in his left calf. Something stringy must have pulled. Could it be multiple sclerosis? Or perhaps cramp? These days he even got cramp reaching to cut his toenails. Not that anyone was excused: you’d see them before extra time at football tournaments; on two hundred grand a week, the world’s greatest footballers lying on the turf as if they’d been shot. He knew their agony; he shared it, this hopping devastated fool in luminous running shoes, with linen shorts over scraggy legs.
    On he went towards the Green, believing he’d either run his twinges off or become accustomed to the pain. Much worse than this, he soon learned, was the publicexposure, the panting parade of shame. Many pedestrians seemed to be walking faster than he ran, but he did get past a banker’s au pair pushing a child. A Polish builder he knew was unloading his van, and the Hungarian waiters from his local cafe, on their way to work, were keen to smile and wave, and offer him a cigarette. His neighbours, a lawyer, a madman and a journalist, were easy to pass. The dry cleaner, contemplating eternity outside his shop, didn’t see him.
    He noticed couples who could abide one another all day, who would eat breakfast and talk together in holiday hotels, and felt like a man who’d opened a pornographic website only to see awful images of consummated happiness and joyful love-making among the married, more obscene than obscenity.
    He ran past the private school, the state school and the French school, as well as the Chinese church, the Catholic church, and the mosque which occupied the ground floor of a house. He flew past Tesco’s and several corner shops, as well as an Indian restaurant, a Moroccan coffee shop, and several charity shops. In the window of one, he saw a display of the books he didn’t have room for in his small new flat where, he believed, the nights all lasted a hundred years. He would wake to no family sounds. He had to learn to live again. And why would anyone want to do that?
    It was some relief to make it into the park, and to see other grimacing self-scourgers, many even older. Thiswas where he spotted his rival again, the wife he couldn’t love or kill. There she was, a tiny figure pumping strongly into the wind, across the far side of the grass. She disappeared through the trees, apparently untiring.
    After a concentrated circuit of the park, he came out onto the pavement for a bit. Dodging the commuters, he headed down into a fetid underpass where his footsteps were loud, and up and out onto the towpath beside the vast surprise of the river. Public schoolboys and girls in wellington boots, with their lives ahead of them, pulled long boats out onto the water.
    He skirted them and, after about fifteen minutes, came to the bridge. He looked up and ran half the steps. It would be wise, he thought, to plod the rest. He was breathing heavily, and coughing, being not a Cartesian vessel of higher consciousness and rationality, but rather a shapeless bag of bursting tendons, extruding veins and screaming lungs.
    Yet some spark of agency remained, and on the bridge he jogged again, glimpsing the wide view, and the eyes of the lovely houses overlooking it, places he’d never afford now. Home is for children, he thought, tossing his wedding ring over the side. Perhaps there was a pile of the golden ones down there,