Puccini's Ghosts Read Online Free PDF

mean
bastard
!’
    ‘Fleur! There is no call…’
    ‘Oh, for God’s sake, Raymond!’
    ‘Well, it’s a fact. And there’s insurance, and have you any notion what petrol costs? And you’ve to take into account,’ he said mournfully, ‘depreciation. You never get your money back on a car. We’d be better seeing to the damp.’
    There was a tight moment of silence.
    ‘You mean bastard! You
bastard
!’
    Lila stepped swiftly out of the way. Fleur stormed out with a scream about the Last Bloody Straw, trapping a wad of mint green nylon in the door. It muffled the slam and ruined the exit. She screamed again and yanked the material after her, ripping it. Lila sat down again and waited while her cornflakes sank in the milk and collapsed into saturated orange scabs. The music room door slammed,
Turandot
started, and her father went to work.
    Lila had watched him cycle past the window and over the bridge towards Burnhead, his pumping feet appearing and disappearing from under his grey plastic cycling cape. Then, bludgeoned by the noise and surrendering herself to a trance of loathing for the wet view, she did not move from the window. Afternoon shadow would crawl into the room and displace the morning’s, and she would not move. She did not wonder if from the room across the hall her mother was staring at the same view and escaping into a trance of her own. The rain dripped down.
Monday is pale green and unripe. Tuesday is beige, Wednesday is white.
But they weren’t; the days were insubstantial, colourless, nothing more than shadows burning dimly in emptiness, putting out no heat. She felt trapped and erased, and could not move. She would fall away into ash, probably, in the end.

    m y first thought is just to get people in. Just get a couple of men in and tell them to get rid of the lot; there are firms that do such things. But when I call the solicitor to get the name of somebody who will take it on for me, it turns out I can’t. I find that the solicitor requires me to go through ‘the deceased’s effects’, something to do with valuation and tax, and now there’s more. They ask me if the death has been registered. I have to call the bank, they need the numbers of his accounts and any cards which somehow I have to find, why haven’t
they
got them? And the undertaker suggests I may care to look out a set of clothes for him unless I want him sent off in the pyjamas he was wearing or wrapped in a polyester shroud. They all need copies of the death certificate.
    I have to find things. I have to think. I have to organise. I am unnerved, because these are tasks for which I am not equipped and have no aptitude: tasks requiring at the very least completed forms, lists, decisions and in all probability also buckets and bin bags and rubber gloves. Now I realise that with him gone I was imagining this place already empty of anything important. Not that I think that things left behind spill spontaneously out of houses and dispose of themselves, but I am not prepared for discovering significance in the clutter. It’s surprising, like raking over a rubbish dump and finding it full of things I want. I’m not talking about discovering treasure. It’s the cheap, broken, dirty things—his disposable razor, a comb with oily strands of hair coiled in it, a tin opener sticky with the dark glue of canned foods, objects I don’t recognise and never watched him use—that lie in wait and assault me, because I see them in his hands. I see the daily pickings-up and placings-down of objects by those hands, everyday tasks filling year after year and becoming in themselves the main point, the last of his pride residing in such lonely skills as shaving himself unaided or opening a small tin of baked beans. As Christine says, he was still managing fine.
    The picture I have of his hands comes from childhood. They are huge, safe paddles, warm and oddly veined and three times bigger than mine. Which brings me to the problem of his body. I