Something to Tell You Read Online Free PDF Page A

She could appear on any programme involving weight problems, drug addiction, domestic abuse, tattooing, teenagers, rape, rage, race or lesbianism—or any combination of the aforementioned.
    If you wanted, and often if you didn’t, she’d show you videos of the programmes. There was no way you could sneer at any of it. If I wanted to talk about the original confessionalists—those I read as a young man, such as St. Augustine, Rousseau, De Quincey, Edmund Gosse—she would refer to her “agonies” as contemporary therapy for the nation. These presenters did what I did, except it was public, for the benefit of all, not snobby, and certainly more amusing.
    Most recently, “with all this war going on,” Miriam had taken up with a wise wolf. There was a sanctuary Bushy drove her to, where she sat with an old wolf, and sometimes his relatives. These animals didn’t commune with just anyone, she believed. You had to have “the spirit.” There was no doubt that she did, of all people, have the spirit.
    I say that I don’t know how Bushy made a living out of cab driving, but I suppose Miriam must have paid him a percentage of her earnings. If anyone asked him, in the English manner, what he did, he would reply, “Nuffin’ without being paid.”
    Miriam and I knew well enough that Bushy had something of our grandfather’s “ingenuity”; perhaps that’s why we liked him. But she had it too: certainly Miriam usually had some money moving in and out. Bushy was a trusted assistant in her numerous small-time “trades”: smuggled TVs, computers, iPods, phones, cigarettes, porno, alcohol and dope, as well as the leather jackets and DVDs she obtained and sold, via him and the older children, around the neighbourhood and, mostly, in the Cross Keys.
    Not long ago she bought two hundred pairs of stolen Levi’s from a Polish builder. Having realised they were all size 46 waist, we had to spend a weekend ripping out the labels so she could sell them as various sizes, knowing that people at a car-boot sale wouldn’t want to try them on, being dazzled, we predicted, by the low price. She’d also obtained a consignment of stolen Turgeniev vodka, for which the price was 5,000 pounds. I helped her out with a loan, and soon the local pubs and clubs were awash with the lousy stuff. People might be bleeding from the stomach, but we had made, as Miriam put it, “a good honest profit.”
    Miriam was a more capable criminal than my former pals and accomplices Wolfgang or Valentin, so much so that I liked to call her an “entrepreneur,” at which she scoffed. However, it was true that she had spent years building up her “business.” She knew when to sell, and who desired what. Her success had required cunning, tenacity and knowledge of others, and she kept herself, her family and several neighbours just about alive by it, quite a feat. She and the law, therefore, were not on good, or even respectful, terms. The law was naked Power, to be avoided and ignored. She liked to say she’d never appeared on any government computer, as though this liberated her.
    Despite her generous description of me as a “doctor of the soul,” I wasn’t so respectable that, after leaving Josephine and returning to live in the two floors of the flat I used as a consulting room, the cramped, damp cellar was not already full of Bushy-delivered plastic bags containing “hot” goods Miriam was afraid to keep in her house, as well as rolls of Bubble Wrap, for which she had no room and hadn’t been able to secure a buyer. I was, however, glad to be keeping my transgressions alive, even in such a lowly capacity. I would, when I got round to it, use the Bubble Wrap to keep Rafi’s old shoes and football boots from getting damp, mementos of his fading childhood.
    As a young man myself, studying movie and pop stars, I strove to make myself less nerdy, more hip. But I had always been the quiet, good, bookish one. There wasn’t room for two show-offs in our