Solo Read Online Free PDF Page B

Nan and Pop.
    No wonder humans invented Nintendo.
    The difficulty is to decipher what’s real. I’ve done it before – hallucinate, manufacture, fantasise, lie, depending on your perspective. I can’t remember how much I fabricated.
    Unravelling.

P ART T WO

The Liar Paradox

(1) This sentence is false
    If (1) is true, then (1) is false. On the other hand, assume (1) is false. Because the Liar Sentence is saying precisely that (namely that it is false), the Liar Sentence is true, so (1) is true. We’ve now shown that (1) is true if and only if it is false. Since (1) is one or the other, it is both.
    ‘ T HE L IAR P ARADOX’
B RADLEY D OWDEN
T HE I NTERNET E NCYCLOPAEDIA OF P HILOSOPHY

1

A WAY ON BUSINESS
    When you are really young, you can make something up so well that you end up believing it.
    I used to tell people my father was away on business.
    When I was at Infants school we had a cottage at the beach that we visited on weekends, with a gardener who came to mow and trim hedges. I wore a hat and blazer to school, and the other girls were from ‘old money’. We looked like the kind of family whose father went away on business.
    After Infants, though, at my new school, I never invited home people who I had told the business-trip story.
    In Year 4 I told Rebecca Holdenstodd that my father had disappeared. She wanted to know all about it and asked me lots of questions.
    We sat cross-legged in the corner near the cricket nets with our knees almost touching while the Year 5 boys played a rambling game of footy nearby.
    My dad disappeared on one of those afternoons when the heat hung over you like syrup and the clouds draped across the sky were a greyish-green colour. There was a storm coming, but it hadn’t arrived yet.
    I knelt in front of the window and my dad was in the armchair reading the newspaper with one leg folded over the other and his glasses perched on the end of his nose as though he was an old Salvation Army volunteer rattling the collection box – the kind who sits outside the supermarket and shames people into giving their change. Every now and then Dad would turn the page and glance at me with the shame-look, because I was supposed to be finishing my homework sheet on skeletons and starting my BTN report.
    The last time he looked at me like that I said, ‘I’ll do it in a minute! OK? Jeez!’
    I didn’t know that’s the last thing I would ever say to him. I was looking for old Mrs Katsourinis. Every day she stepped off the 417 bus across the road from our house in her long black dress and support-hose. Old Mrs Katsourinis had a face like a scrunched-up brown-paper bag. It was so rubbery and pleated that I was sure it was a mask. One day whoever was under there would lift it up to sneeze, blow their nose, or itch their eye. I didn’t want to miss it.
    This day, though, I didn’t see the bus. I didn’t see anything moving. Even the cat on the porch next door lay on its back with its legs splayed as if it was dead. Everything was so still before the storm it was as though the whole day was holding its breath.
    Then the wind whooshed along the street pushing leaves and papers before it. It pressed against the oleander trees on the median strip. They’re poisonous, you know. My dad said you shouldn’t touch them. Some kids used oleander branches to toast marshmallows over a campfire. They got poisoned and died. The branches folded over sideways. The laundry slapped on the line and the tops of the wheelie bins smacked up and down in time.
    You could see the hail marching across the rooftops before it reached our house.
    I ran out into the back yard in my T-shirt and undies with a beanie on my head so I wouldn’t get sconed. I picked up the hailstones from where they landed on the grass and collected them in the wheelbarrow. I popped one ball of ice into my mouth, even though Dad always said I wasn’t supposed to eat them. I bit down and it crumbled between my teeth like the shaved ice you