Sacrifice of Fools Read Online Free PDF

Talya on the mantelpiece. But he’s thinking about Seyoura and Muskravhat and Senkajou and Seyamang and Vrenanka Harridi, folded and curled together in their little suite of rooms upstairs.
    In the bright loud eatery, Andy Gillespie thinks about families, human and Shian. There’s something great and sane to Andy Gillespie about the Hold, the amorphous social unit of the Shian species. Two or two hundred, great roofs or small, lives packed close together under them. Lives come, lives go, lives pass through, the Hold endures. Less than a marriage, more than a friendship or a club. Communal. Dirty word. Nasty word. Discredited word. We’ve forgotten how to be communal. We’ve exalted the individual over the corporate. We’re afraid of others. We are ourselves, we are independent, individual, we live our own lives and we are free. And we end up in our separate rooms with our tinnies and our takeaways and our remote controls individual and independent and apart.
    A family, Andy Gillespie has concluded, is what works. A functioning arrangement. Blood is not enough.
    He’s brought copies of the photographs of his daughters into his office. They sit on a shelf above the photocopier. They should get to know this new family. Maybe someday they’ll all be part of it.
    The staff are cleaning his table around him now, and taking the salt and pepper away to be refilled. OK, OK, I’m going. He turns his collar up against the dark and the rain. Girl students huddle past under umbrellas; the boys in their wee bum-freezer jackets just get wet. It’s a machismo thing. The cafés and diners are bright and loud and busy.
    You’d almost think you weren’t in Belfast.
    Sirens. Woo-woos. Always something to bring you back. They sound close. He hates the sound of sirens. There is nothing good in them, ever.
    In the offie he buys two six packs of Guinness. He’s missed the chemist by five minutes, but the all-night Spar by the station does a wide range of aspirins. It always makes him smile, the aspirin thing. What a great cheap way to get out of your head. You have to have a Shian physiology, though. They’re as knowledgeable about different brands as wine connoisseurs about clarets. There’s a new soluble aspirin-codeine out that’s the thing at the moment. Chemists can’t keep it in stock. The Spar doesn’t do it, but it’s got Junior Disprin, which is almost as sought after. Some day the pharmaceutical companies are going to wise up to this and start putting out their own designer brands. Shortly after that governments’ll be slapping tax on them.
    He’ll stick to the black stuff. Each to their own poison.
    He’s early so he goes the long way through student land. The old East Belfast Woodstock Road thing was that you couldn’t live over here, it was uninhabitable, it wasn’t proper Belfast. Students and Chinkies and fags and republicans lived over there. Weird Outsiders. Not real people. Now he wouldn’t live in any other part of town. He likes living among students and Chinkies and fags and republicans and weird Outsiders. They’re real. It’s the Woodstock Road, East Belfast Wee Ulster mentality that’s uninhabitable. Fake people living by fakes rules and fake principles. Fake lives. Everything sacrificed to playing the role, being the man, doing the things. Do the friends, do the family, do the wife and kids and house bit. What if it isn’t right? What if it isn’t what you want? Doesn’t matter. It’s the way. You follow it, or you don’t exist.
    So, Gillespie, is being what you want to be worth the price of family, friends, wife, kids?
    The question makes him falter as he comes round the corner of Wellesley Street on to University Street.
    And he stops dead.
    There are five police cars, one police motorbike and three ambulances outside the Shian Welcome Centre.
    Those woo-woos…
    There are police in yellow jackets and paramedics in green coveralls. There are people in suits and coats. Blue lights pulse;