Martyn Pig Read Online Free PDF Page A

while, then said, ‘The murderer’s beautiful mistress.’
    â€˜Why?’
    She shrugged and smiled. ‘Why not?’
    One thing we didn’t talk about much was Dean. A few weeks after she’d started seeing him, after I’d met him for the first time, I asked her why she was going out with him.
    â€˜What do you mean?’ she said.
    â€˜Well ...’
    â€˜Well what?’
    â€˜Well ... he’s a bit of a dope, isn’t he?’
    She went mad. ‘How the hell would you know what he’s like! You’ve only met him
once
. Christ!’
    â€˜I didn’t mean—’
    â€˜You didn’t mean
what
? What’s it got to do with
you
, anyway? Who the hell d’you think you are?’
    I apologised as best I could but she didn’t want to know. She sulked for a couple of days, kept out of my way, didn’t come round for a while. I thought I’d blown it. Then, all of a sudden, she just seemed to forget all about it. She came round one night and everything was back to normal, as if nothing had ever been said.
    Still, we didn’t talk about Dean much after that.
    Dad was drunk when I went downstairs, which was no surprise. He was drunk every night. Sometimes he went out and sometimes he stayed in, but it didn’t make any difference, he was drunk wherever he was. He drank during the day, too, kept himself topped up with beer, but he never really got going on the hard stuff until the evening. Beer in the morning, beer for lunch and beer in the afternoon. Then beer and whisky for tea, and finally, whisky for supper. A balanced diet. He drank so much that even when he wasn’t drinking he was drunk.
    In the evening, after he’d started on the whisky, there were four distinct stages to his drunkenness. Stage One, the first hour or so after he’d started, he’d make out like he was my best pal – cracking jokes, ruffling my hair, asking how I was, giving me money.
    â€˜An’thing you need, Marty? ’Ere, ’ere’s a coupla quid, go on, get y’self a book or something.’
    I hate being called Marty. And I hated him giving me money. He’d always ask for it back the next day, anyway. When he was like this, trying to be funny, trying to be Mr Nice Guy, I think that’s when I hated him the most. I preferred him when he got to Stage Two. At least it was honest. Stage Two was mostly self-pitying misery. There’d be a silent interval between Stage One and Stage Two, then the occasional grunt at something on the television or something in the newspaper, then he’d gradually build up steam, cursing his ugly luck, cursing the injustices of this world, cursing this and cursing that, cursing Mum for deserting him, cursing Aunty Jean for being such a witch, cursing me for tying him down with responsibilities, cursing just about everything that wasn’t him, basically. Then, all at once, he’d just stop, and for the next hour or so he’d just sit there slumped in his chair, smoking his cigarettes and pouring whisky down his neck until he got to Stage Three. Stage Three was incoherence with an unpredictable hint of violence. It didn’t bother me too much, the violence, not once I’d learned how to cope with it. It wasn’t difficult, really. It usually started with a question. The trick was to give the right answer, but that wasn’t always easy because it was almost impossible to understand what he was saying.
    â€˜I tellya, I tellya, lissen, amadoin’ the bessacan or amanot? Y’thingiseasy? Y’thingiseasy? Y’thing I donwunna gi’y’thebess? Eh? Lissen. Y’thing I donwunna?’
    If I gave the right answer he’d just leer at me for a second then start on about something else. But if I gave the wrong answer – like, ‘What?’ – then he’d more than likely swing for me. But, like I said, it didn’t really matter. Most times he was so