Night Read Online Free PDF

she was not like an old lioness, she had more in common with a washing board, bleached, scoured, dry. He moved us towards their tossed bed. He mimed to her what to do. She went to a medicine cabinet. She had to coax it open with her nail as the key was missing and there was no little latch or handle for her benefit. She scooped some cream out of a blue tin. It was white and over-runny, and I was able to recall the exact price of it, and knew that a hundred lids of that commodity could secure a plastic tulip for some town housewife with a yen for the forest. She was no forest woman, more your allotment ilk. Comes, half comes, quarter comes, struggles at comes, they are much the same thing. We battled and wrestled and slept and wakened and adhered and writhed, throughout the night. His snores had a trace of mucus in them.
    â€œHark”, he said, “the house awakens.” I heard of all things a baby cry, such an ordinary, no, such an extraordinary thing. It seems to me that babies along with cows are passing from our lives altogether. Soonthey will be after-images, cords, threads, suspenders, emanations, suspenders to former times. I slipped away. Quite united they looked, he half awake, she feigning sleep or maybe it only seemed to be a feign because of the way her lids trembled, maybe dreaming she was, roguish dreams. Travelling home in my dishevelled state I met nuns and milkmen. It was a Sunday. The nuns were muttering their prayers and the milkmen doing their rounds. Long white notes protruded from empty milk bottles. Probably they were for alternative orders – double cream for the jellies, brown eggs for Grandma, a cancellation maybe. I was not in any hurry. I was dressed in lamé of all things and the air was to my liking, drizzly.
    I wouldn’t mind living it all over again. I met them in the pub where there was a sort of improvised ball. Phil the Fluter stuff. It was New Year’s Eve, and just at midnight people jumped up and started to dance and to rout other people out of their chairs. The hard topers spit in their drinks to put their bespoke on them. I’d gone there alone for a decko. Amazing enticements – speed, lights, food, chicks, disc jockeys and table telephones. It was like the eve of Waterloo all of a sudden, that so-called spiffing night when Belgium’s capital gathered her beauty and her chivalry. There we were, linking, moving en masse to the gallery, one faction going up the steps, and another bursting out into the street and little side groups weaving their way between tables, weaving and waving, concertina music, baritone voices, the mirrors frosted, the dun pillars skewered with masks, the whole place alive with singing and gaudiness,people catching sight of themselves and making weird faces and blowing kisses. There was no resident band but the regulars had brought their own instruments – spoons, combs, penny whistles. There were plenty of Coose spalpeens in that mêlée but I shunned them, it was Nick I tagged on to. “Tap o’ the mornin’ to you,” he said.
    â€œTo hell or to Connaught,” I said, using the war cry of Oliver Cromwell.
    â€œDon’t go away,” he said, touching my buttoned bodice. Something nice about him, a softie. I could picture him with a slane, cutting turf and chewing his quid of tobacco, with maybe a pipe, a hubbly bubbly or a cherrywood to gnash on. I suppose osmosis was our first actual endeavour, the sucking came later when we rammed through into the garden of life, and the gnashing succeeding on puberty. I spent the night with him and his spouse, we scrambled upstairs after closing time. They were managers there, which meant we had free nuts, free booze and the companionship of their guard dog, an Alsatian, a eunuch, named Boris.
    â€œCome here you git and fetch this fucking coal,” she said.
    As master of the house he insisted on making a fire to ring out the old and ring in the new. Lucky he