Mourning Ruby Read Online Free PDF Page A

pieces of chicken in seasoned flour, when Adam came up the stairs with Joe. I had shared the flat with Joe for three years. It was the kind of love that keeps you safe, and sex never entered it. We knew too well what other things would have flown out of the box then. Fear, disappointment, rage. Just friends , as people say, lingering stickily on what they touch. But in my view friendship can be rarer and tenderer than love.
    We knew each other in our dailiness. The rush of water into a kettle, the heap of tangled washing in a blue plastic laundry basket, the smell of each other’s bedrooms. Joe didn’t ask me to take care of him, because he already knew how to take care of himself. He was as handy as a sailor when it came to keeping the place as itshould be. I remember the time I saw Joe pour washing soda down our kitchen sink, and follow it with a kettleful of water, and smile at my surprise.
    ‘You get a build-up of grease in the U-bend otherwise,’ he said.
    Joe and I were a family. We weren’t born into it, or adopted into it, but we made it together like a nest from what everyone else considers rubbish.
    We shared our shopping, our phone bills, our colds, our friends and our festivals. Joe would buy a little Christmas tree and wedge it in the crook of the parapet gully and run a cable out to it. Five floors up, our tree shone with steady light.
    Joe’s mother came to visit us every six months. She would clamber the flights of stairs to our flat, bracing herself before the last, steep, twisting climb up the servants’ staircase. She would fetch up at our kitchen table with a flag of purplish-red flying in each cheek. She climbed those stairs as if they were the mountain of her love for Joe. When she’d recovered, Iris would drink tea from a rose-spattered cup and saucer which we kept for her, and bring a packet of Jaffa Cakes out of her stout mock-leather shopping bag.
    They’d grown up alone together, a woman who’d never thought she’d have a child at all, and the child whose intelligence glittered like sparks of light from a faster and more daring planet.
    ‘He gets it from his father,’ Iris would say to me, remembering how Joe’s father would play correspondence chess on paper in those days before computers, and how he answered the questions on TV quizzes before the contestants could get a word out. She used totell him that he could make their fortune if he chose. But he would never go on TV. He was too…
    Shy? Nervous?
    No, that wasn’t it. Iris cast about for the right form of words. ‘He wouldn’t want to use his gifts in that way,’ she said at last. ‘He was a man of principle.’
    He died of an asthma attack when Joe was two, and then Iris was on her own, forty-five, four-square, and probably more afraid than I’d ever understand. Joe’s father didn’t even suffer from asthma. He was a strong man. He had been in the RAF and passed a stringent medical.
    His death came out of the blue.
    ‘She used to bike me to school,’ Joe told me. He described the tough, black, upright bike with its carrier seat and wicker basket. When it rained she wrapped a yellow plastic cape and hood around him so that nothing of him showed but a strip of his face. He remembered the broadness of her back and the way the bike surged boldly alongside the buses and lorries, with a ring of its bell to warn drivers. He was proud of her. She never socialized at the school – the other mothers were girls, to her – but she read every note that came home, found out about every chance that could be Joe’s, and watched tirelessly to see what the other children wore and what equipment they carried, so that Joe could have the same. The teachers frayed her nerves but she made herself learn their language and do her son justice at parents’ evenings.
    She had a little job, lunchtimes at the local pub, which fitted in nicely with school hours. In the holidays six-year-old Joe sat on a bar stool while she cleaned, andshe would