Noah's Ark Read Online Free PDF

said, ‘pre-prandial ejaculation. Besides, I was such a fool twenty years ago, I didn’t know how to take on a good thing when it came my way. I would have passed you up, I reckon. Think of it. Me at nineteen. Oh Noah, I wish you weren’t going today.’
    ‘I want for you to paint those oranges, okay?’ Noah said.
    ‘Yes,’ she said.
    ‘And water my bedding plants, will you?’ he said. Ali nodded. Noah had a small greenhouse which he loved, full of yoghurt pots with lolly sticks, all of it rather beyond her area of expertise.
    ‘I will take the greatest care of all your children,’ she said.
    They listened to the sound of Daniel’s urine frothing satisfactorily in the lavatory bowl, before he appeared in the kitchen. He was already in his baseball cap, which he wore to flatten his curls. These he considered unmanly. The cap had been a present from Noah’s mother who wished her grandson to overcome the disadvantages of growing up in England. She wanted him to be a good mixer and a good all-rounder. Outgoing, sporty, brave, ambitious and clever. Ali would rather have had Daniel a good pianist than a good all-rounder, but she believed he had the right to be as unambitious and introverted as he liked. Noah glanced shrewdly at Ali as he began to cram the last of his stuff into a travelling bag.
    ‘AI, I want that boy in school while I’m away,’ he said with emphasis. ‘Okay?’ Noah said that Daniel had to go to nurseryschool so that Ali could be a ‘mensch’. That was why he had insisted on the art school. He believed that she was absurdly soft on Daniel – softer even than on Hattie and Camilla – and that was saying something. Ali was soft on everyone, but it was perfectly true that she would have been especially happy to have had Daniel at home all the time. He crawled into bed with her when Noah wasn’t there. Even now that he had turned four, he occasionally sucked at her nipples when she bent down to wash the floor, like a little goat. Noah believed that Daniel was overindulged. Ali believed, on the other hand, that Noah’s mother had probably never been soft enough on him.
    ‘Is it school?’ Daniel said, suspiciously.
    ‘Yes,’ Noah said before Ali could shilly-shally on the subject. ‘But you’re in luck this week. Thursday’s a day off. There’s a local election. The school hall is used as a polling booth.’ Noah couldn’t vote in British elections, but he did his bit, when he could, by ensuring that his wife, who had British nationality, got to the polling station on the right day. This was especially scrupulous of him since he knew she would vote Labour.
    ‘Is it Fursday?’ Daniel said hopefully, which made Noah smile.
    ‘It’s Wednesday,’ he said. ‘Tomorrow’s Thursday.’ Daniel was dedicated to the belief that Noah went to America to hunt. He knew from the song that Davey Crockett shot a bear in America when he was only three, so why else would one go there? He clung to this fantasy though Hattie called him ‘Stupid’ and ‘Baby’ and pointed out that Noah brought home things from Zabars in his luggage, not bearskins. Daniel was a natural predator, patient, quiet and dedicated. He set bird traps in the garden with string and bacon rashers. He wanted badly to catch real live fish. He had once seen a film of
Huckleberry Finn
and now constantly lamented the regrettable absence of rafts in modern life. He had worn a dagger round his neck all last summer and had said he was Mowgli. Ali had read him the Mowgli stories, but she had left out the bits about Bagheera andthe child beating because she could not bear the idea of anyone beating children, especially in the cause of moral improvement. Could not bear it. It made her shake to see a child being smacked at a bus stop. Noah said that the sadistic pages were probably the very pages that kids like best. Wasn’t that why Daniel always lingered longest over the page in his Arthurian Legends where King Pellinore’s stab wound