Playing James Read Online Free PDF

on, Colshannon,' says Ben as he drains his pint glass, 'let's go home.'
    I resist the urge to give the palm tree a swift kicking as we leave and instead wave to the barman across a sea of people and get stuck in the revolving door for two turns before Ben pulls me out.
    Ben and I drunkenly meander back to my flat, singing rowdy rugby songs to which I don't know any of the words but prefer to make up my own anyway.
    I live in a darling little flat in Clifton (posh part of Bristol). It's small, but I love it so. It's situated on the first floor of a gorgeous old Regency house and my sitting room has huge sash windows that cost me over half a month's salary to curtain. The bedroom is at the back of the house and thankfully has smaller windows which look out over our neatly boxed communal gardens. I also have a tiny guest room which just about fits a small double bed and nothing else.
    I live alone at the moment but I am hoping that in the not-too-distant future Ben will live here too. I choose to live on my own – if you had grown up in my household then you would too. There are obvious advantages to single occupancy, one of which being, as every self-respecting hermit knows, the freedom to eat toast for supper without the many questions that accompany eating toast for supper (Is that all you're having? Why don't you put some ham on that? How many vegetables have you eaten today?) Also, I don't have to endure cohabitation with my family, who manage to take living together just those few steps closer to hell. They overstep the boundaries even nightmare flatmates respect. You have no idea how blissful it is to find everything in the fridge just the way I left it. It is a constant surprise to me to find my car still parked outside, money still in my purse and my eyebrows still intact every morning. I suppose I was a bit of an accident as I am the youngest out of five. The rest of them have been a bit pesky and although I didn't exactly have a haloed childhood, I think, relatively speaking, I didn't give my parents a huge amount of trouble. My brothers in particular gave my mother a lot of headaches. I remember her buying a book called
How to Deal With a Troublesome Teenager
. When I asked her which brother she had bought it for, she said, 'All of them. I'm either going to smack them over the head with it or stand on it so I can reach while I smack them over the head with something else.'
    We buy kebabs at the top of Park Street. Ben has everything and I have everything except the meat bit because it always looks dodgy and someone from the paper was sick for five days after he had one. But Ben has the digestion and constitution of an ox so he is never sick. We leave a Hansel and Gretel trail of salad in our wake and wander up the hill towards Clifton.
    I decide I want a piggyback halfway up one of the hills, but can't manage to leap up on to Ben's back. God knows how someone as uncoordinated as myself has ever managed to go out with Ben for so long. After the third attempt, Ben runs up the hill carrying one leg while the other one drags behind us and I hang halfway between.
    We fall, giggling madly, into bed.
    'Now,' says Ben, 'I have an important issue I want the new crime correspondent to look into …'
    I am awake very early on Saturday morning, and lie in bed wondering if something awful happened to me yesterday or whether I've just had a bad dream. Slowly it all comes filtering back and I remember that I have been given the police beat. In view of its reputation, I don't quite know how to feel about it. Leaving Ben sleeping, I slip out of bed in order to make some tea to quench my raging thirst. Yesterday's events are still weighing heavily on my mind half an hour later so I go back to the bedroom to see if Ben is awake and perhaps might want to talk about it.
    He's not. I bounce around on the bed for a while, open and shut drawers and curtains and generally make a nuisance of myself. I then check again on Ben's slumber