Sonata of the Dead

Sonata of the Dead Read Online Free PDF

Book: Sonata of the Dead Read Online Free PDF
Author: Conrad Williams
her. Proper picnics, with steel cutlery and china plates. Real glasses. We’d drink chilled rosé and listen to the radio while Sarah turned cartwheels or made giant daisy chains. One time, Rebecca, she said:
    Let’s have another.
    And I said:
Maybe… we’ll see.
    I often wonder if I’d said yes we’d have moved elsewhere, and she’d have gone to a different gym. Maybe she’d still be alive.
    ‘…and as for that French prong with his anachronistic Hoxton facking fin and his pink boots, he couldn’t pass the facking parcel, the cahhhnt…’
    The driver slowed up around the gnarly bit where Camden High Street feeds into Kentish Town Road. His invective faded too, maybe because he’d run out of things to say or more likely because the noises I was making didn’t marry with his content any more. Quite possibly I’d chuckled and said ‘yes’ enthusiastically when he asked if he was boring the shit out of me. The tired, clustered Kentish Town thoroughfares became the slightly leafier, slightly more spread out streets of Gospel Oak. We hit Highgate Road and I readied my wallet. I tumbled out on to Swain’s Lane a little more refreshed than I’d thought. I gave the cabbie his fare, and a tip to show him I wasn’t the sort of cahhhnt he’d taken me for, and turned to face Leopold’s. I’d been here a few times for a morning-after-the-night-before breakfast. They did great Bloody Marys and hefty full Englishes to sponge up all the undigested alcohol and regret in your belly. Now they were open for the evening crowd they sold artisanal pies and craft ales from a nearby microbrewery. It was all wobbly old tables and mismatched wooden chairs. The walls were plastered with ancient beer mats and sealed with varnish. Newspapers and board games. Candles melted into wine bottles. They played classical music, exclusively.
    I went in and sat at the tiny corner bar. It wasn’t too busy midweek, but it picked up on a Friday. I ordered a Czech Pilsner and a black pudding and wild venison pie. The girl behind the bar was dressed in a purple vest and denim shorts. A grey beanie kept her hair out of her eyes. She smiled as I handed over the shirt from my back; one of her teeth was decorated with a twinkling red jewel and there was a little silver bolt through the flesh just below her bottom lip. Her eye snagged on my scar; maybe she thought it was skin decor. Maybe she coveted it. She was Sarah’s age. I had to restrain myself from grabbing hold of her throat and demanding she tell me where my daughter was. I wasn’t so pissed to want to risk a night on one of Mawker’s skidmarked mattresses.
    A door to the rear led through to the toilets and the stairs to the rooms upstairs, which could be hired for private parties. A magnetic board fixed to the wall was covered in fliers and adverts and offers. Among them I found reference to the photography club, held in one of the upstairs rooms. They met on Thursdays, apparently, which was today. But I was too late. Their meetings finished at seven-thirty p.m. Presumably they had relocated to Hampstead Heath and were busy taking pictures of kites, muggers and flashers.
    But no, there were a couple of women in one corner looking through a small album of black-and-white photographs. One of them clenched an ostentatious camera bag between her knees. I felt my heart smack against my ribcage at the thought that they must know Gower and, by extension, Sarah. I took my pint and sauntered over, pulled back a chair at the table next to theirs.
    They both looked up at me. I smiled and sat down. I guessed they were in their early thirties. One of them wore a dark-blue sweater dress and knee-length buckled boots. The other was more formally attired in a grey pinstripe trouser suit over a white ruffle shirt, as if she’d just come from the office. The photograph album in front of them was opened to a page on which there was glued a photograph of a brilliant white jumbo jet framed by fat, leaden
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