Shadows & Tall Trees Read Online Free PDF Page B

done then.
    “Mom,” he said, his tongue hardening against the roof of his mouth.
    Now she was drinking him. Three of his teeth loosened and fell from the gums. He swallowed them. A groan slipped out and his mother turned him around to her and passed his fluids back into his mouth blended with her own. He again tilted his head to the sky. He looked everywhere for its stars but saw only a great paling lens. A jar lowering, a world going on and on.

I T F LOWS FROM THE M OUTH
R OBERT S HEARMAN
    I ’d been flattered when asked to be the godfather of little Ian Wheeler, of course, but I’d had certain misgivings. When I’d met up with Max in the pub, something we liked to do regularly back then, I’d tried to explain at least part of the problem. “Oh, don’t worry about the whole spiritual adviser nonsense,” said Max. “Lisa’s no more religious than I am; this is just to keep her parents happy.” So I caved in, and went along to the christening, and watched Ian get dipped into a font, and afterwards posed for photographs in which I must admit I passed myself off quite successfully as someone just as proud and doting as the actual father and mother.
    But my real concern had nothing to do with any religious aspect, and more with the discomfort of shackling myself for life to a person I had no reason to believe I would ever necessarily like. I’d had enough problems when Max started dating Lisa—Max and I had been inseparable since school, and now suddenly I was supposed to welcome Lisa into the gang, and want to spend time with her, and chat to her, and buy lager and lime for her—and it wasn’t that I
disliked
Lisa, not as such, though she was a bit dull and she wore too much perfume and I had nothing to talk to her about and she had a face as dozy as a stupefied cow. It was more that she had barged her way into a special friendship, with full expectation that I’d not only tolerate the intrusion but welcome it. She never asked if I minded. She never apologized.
    And so it was with little Ian. I’m not saying he was a bad child. It was simply that he was a child at all. I’d never been wild about children, not even when I had been one, and I had always been under the impression that Max had felt the same, and I’d felt rather surprised that he wanted one. Surprised and, yes, disappointed. But then, Max had done lots of things that had surprised me since he’d met Lisa. And my worst fears came to be realized. On the few occasions I went to visit, I would be presented before Ian, as if he were a prince, and every little new thing about him was pointed out to me as if I should be entranced—that he had teeth, or that he could walk, that he’d grown an inch taller—sometimes I was under the impression I was supposed to give the kid a round of applause, as if these weren’t all things that I myself had mastered with greater skill years ago! I just couldn’t warm to my godson. It seemed to me that he was constantly demanding attention, and I could put up with that if it was only his mother he was bothering, but all too often he’d pull the same stunts on Max. Still, I tried to be dutiful, and at Christmas and on birthdays I would send Ian a present. But is it any wonder he made me uncomfortable?—this infant who had crept into my life, though his birth was none of my doing, though his existence wasn’t my fault. With his strangely fat face and his cheeks always puffed out as if he were getting ready to cry. I played godfather the best I could, but I felt a fraud.
    When Ian was killed at the age of three, knocked down by a car (and safely within the speed limit, so the driver could hardly be blamed), I was, of course, horrified. The death of a child is a terrible thing, and I’m not a monster. But if a child was going to have to die, then I’m glad it was Ian.
    Max and I had always been rather unlikely friends, or so I was told: at school he was more popular than I was, more sporty, more outgoing. I