Sheer Blue Bliss Read Online Free PDF Page B

night and returns in the early hours alone, sleeps in on a Sunday morning.
    Tony stretches full-length on her sofa. Likes to lie like this, feet up on the arm, smoking and watching her big colour TV. A programme about gorillas, such wise sad faces. Gorillas shambling about on their big leather feet, one with a baby on its tit, one stretched out in the sun, feet up on a branch. Tony grins, seeing that he’s stretched out just the same. It’s good here with the telly and the plants and all, ferns on the windowsill, a spider plant dangling babies, a stubby ginger-whiskered cactus.
    It’s more friendly somehow than in his own flat. Wouldn’t be relaxing like this if Donna was here though, it’s just her space he likes. It’s female space and female things, accoutrements he gets lonely for. Not another person but another person’s things. Sometimes he thinks, when he finds himself feeling lonely – Christ, he even filled in a computer-dating questionnaire once, not that he couldn’t get any girl he wanted just with a look – that what he’d like would be a wife who worked. No kids, absolutely no way. A nurse maybe who worked nights, yes, then he could get a job in the day and their paths would hardly cross at all. He’d hardly have to see her. Wouldn’t have to eat with her. Can’t bear it when people eat in front of him, opening their mouths and stuffing them, the muscular struggle in their cheeks as they chew and then the passage of the messed-up food down their throats. Makes him want to puke. But he does like to cook. Could cook for her, could leave her wonderful things – brioche, pavlova, syllabub – and she could leave him notes saying how delicious, thanking him in a genuine way, he can just imagine it, she’d have that big smart girly writing and she’d sign her name with her initial and a sprawl of a kiss. And he could live with her things, her cosmetics on the dressing-table, her nightie on the chair, the special kind of yoghurt she likes in the fridge, her toothbrush, tampons, bath-oil.
    It’s ever since he was inside that he appreciates the softness, the sweet smells, the flowery cushion, he hugs it to his chest, the mobile, china birds that chink when you open the door, even the fucking pot-pourri. Inside there was this stink of men, of shit and sweat, farts, testosterone all bottled up and nothing soft; crude jokes and hairiness, bad breath, stiff pricks, almost never a smile or a kind look. He shudders at the memory, buries his nose in the cushion that smells of Donna’s cheap scent. Might miss her, the thought jars him, miss someone? He might miss her when he’s gone.
    No. Getting morbid. He switches off the television which is on about conservation now, and goes into the bedroom. Donna’s bed is covered in a pink duvet with rows of white daisies. It’s got those matching flounce things to hide the legs of the bed. The pillow-cases match the cover but the curtains don’t quite. Beside the bed are two books, romances, both of them have windblown heroines on the front. Donna gets through stacks of this bollocks. Underneath them is her little white Bible with a silver clasp. He’s looked in it before to see her childish writing: Property of and her name and address. He’s opened the Bible to look at the bookmark with a white flower on it and a text: Consider the lilies of the field, how they grow; they toil not, neither do they spin; and yet I say unto you, that even Solomon in all his glory was not arrayed like one of these . She says she reads it but the bookmark has been in the same place for months. He lifts up the duvet, the sheet underneath – pink polyester – is fresh. All clean and ready for her return, her convalescence. It’s a deep bed, soft, all that pink. Tony strips off his clothes and climbs in.

EIGHT
    The road roars. There is no other word for it. It’s no wonder people go mad in