Sacrifice of Fools Read Online Free PDF Page A

for five weeks at a time. Other times, nothing. Sexless as a nun. Sexlesser. There’re lots of old jokes about nuns and candles. Sexless as a baby. But when it’s on, it’s on.
    How can they live that way?
    They probably think the same about us. Neither hot nor cold, just this lukewarm half-passion, how can they live that way?
    At least someone will be getting sex. For Andy Gillespie it’ll be five weeks of sitting staring out at the rain and the red brick cliff-face of the Holiday Inn with its hundred black-plumaged businessmen nesting in its eighty-pound-per-night ledges, answering the phones and saying, hello, you’re through to Andy Gillespie at the Shian Welcome Centre. Normal service has been suspended during the spring season, but if there’s any way I can help you…
    ‘Incidentally,’ Muskravhat adds, ‘I have had a call from a Mr Sinnot, who is the manager of McDonald’s drive-thru at Sprucefield shopping centre. Could you talk to him?’
    Gillespie phones him back. Mr Sinnot’s relieved to be talking to someone with a Belfast accent, with a Belfast vocabulary to match. The Outsiders learned their English by chemical interface with the brain; they have the words but the idiom you learn from experience. It’s this Outsider employee he’s been sent. She’s refusing to follow company policy of smiling at the customers. Gillespie makes an appointment to visit and sort it out, then Seyoura puts her head around the door.
    ‘I have just had a call from Occasionally Plentiful Hunting; they wish to pass their thanks and congratulations to you for helping Fidikihana. You have the makings of a genro in you, Andy.’
    ‘Wrong species, I think.’
    ‘Rights are rights whatever your native species, Andy. Otherwise they are not rights at all. There is no bar to us practising your law, if we can understand this idea of law; so why should you not study ours?’
    ‘This is not a great country for upholding individual rights.’
    ‘You are making excuses, Andy. Yes. A thing. By way of thanking you for your contribution, we have arranged a small celebration later this evening, upstairs, in our apartment. We would be much honoured if you accepted this invitation.’
    ‘A party? For me?’
    ‘That’s correct. Your facial expression indicates a possible negative reaction. Have I given offence?’
    ‘No, I’m just surprised. I hadn’t expected this.’ Upstairs. Home. Into the fold of the Hold. Accepted. Family. ‘Thank you, I’d love to.’
    ‘Very good. If you wish alcohol, you should bring your own.’
    Andy Gillespie catches a movement in the corner of his eye. He moves too slow: Seyamang brings down the big stack of old gold A4. Thud, wail. Seyoura consoles and licks bruises. Vrenanka’s out the back, stalking the cat from the other side of the entry.
    Then it is quitting time and the kids are rounded upstairs and as he’s putting on his coat Gillespie decides that he won’t go back to the flat, he’ll grab something to eat down Botanic Avenue. On the way out the door, as he arms the alarm and waits for the confirmation message, he imagines he feels something brush past him, a touch, nothing more. Imagination. Nothing. The roofs and church spires stir the wind up to all sorts of weird things down this street.
    The staff in the diner are all dressed in denim and try to move him to a smaller table in case a group comes in but Gillespie folds his arms and looks them his three-years-in-the-Maze-terrorist-related-offence look and they go and pick on someone safer. The service is fucking awful. He wasn’t going to leave a tip anyway. He plays strip-mines and slag-heaps with the sugar in the sugar bowl and decides that the music is too loud and the food is average and the serving staff are getting their own back on him, but it’s better than going back to that flat. Too many nights he sits with tinnies and Chinese and the remote control in the dark, smelly living room, looking at his pictures of Stacey and