Starting Over Read Online Free PDF Page B

the way she moved still held me. After the massacre of the posh students, she was one of The Women singing the song about how nothing ever changes, and nothing ever will, and by then I couldn’t take my eyes from her. In the end, Lara hovered on the edge of the stage, like an angel in her newly laundered nightgown, as Jean Valjean died in the arms of his heartbroken daughter and by my side Keith gently sobbed into his bag of Revels.
    I woke to the darkness and the smell of alcohol. I groaned and shifted in my bed, feeling the tug of the IV drip in my arm.
    It was the middle of the night and the television was on with the sound turned down. At first I thought I was alone. And then I saw Keith. Under the light of the sports channel, he was slumped in one of the chairs, the bottle of vodka in his lap sticking up like a codpiece.
    My eyes drifted to the TV. It was a highlights show. Nothing but goals. All the boring bits cut out. I didn’t recognise any of the players or any of the teams. It was some sort of Third World league. I watched a big lean striker nod the ball over a flailing goalkeeper and then run towards the camera. And just before his kissy-kissy teammates reached him, he did a back flip, and then another back flip and then one more. His body violent with health and vitality and youth. His teeth bone-white in his grinning face.
    Mocking me.
    Mocking me.
    Mocking me.
    When I awoke again there was a light and I didn’t know what was going on. I didn’t know if it was just a vision caused by billions of brain synapses shutting down or a chemical hallucination or something else. I did not know if it was my dope-addled imagination or some new unimagined reality. I didn’t know if it was the drugs or heaven.
    Lara’s voice held me.
    ‘You never have to say it back,’ she was saying, and now everyone was crying, including me, although I was getting beyond tears, and that was why it seemed so strange when the doctor burst into the room, laughing like a nutcase and his face all shiny with delight.
    ‘We’ve got one,’ he said.

four
    In my dream I was in this field.
    It was as unfeasibly smooth and green as a billiard table, my dream field, and as I jogged across it I was aware of the crowd watching me. Getting excited, they were, as if they knew what was coming before I did.
    I smiled to myself, because suddenly I knew too, and then I was in the air and upside down – hanging there for that magic second in the middle of a back flip when the crown of the head is just inches from the ground and the soles of the feet are pointing at heaven. And the world is upside down.
    I had once seen a photograph of a fifties actor on a New York street with his girlfriend and the camera had captured him at just that exact moment – hanging upside down in the middle of a back flip, his blond curls almost scraping the city sidewalk, his right-way-up girlfriend smiling at the camera, beautiful and proud. His name was Russ Tamblyn. He had been in West Side Story . Or maybe he hadn’t been in West Side Story just yet, and that was still ahead. But he was adancer. Like my wife. She was the one who showed me the photograph.
    And then I landed and the crowd gasped with astonishment. It was pretty obvious that they had never seen such a perfectly executed back flip. They made that very clear. So I gave them another one. And then another. And every back flip only seemed to make them gasp louder, and clap harder, and go madder.
    I can do back flips, I thought. Good ones, too. Like Russ Tamblyn in the fifties. Him in West Side Story . Bloody hell.
    Then I saw the face in the crowd. All those faces, but that face was the only one I could see. I started running towards the special face, and then I was sliding across the impossibly green grass on my pain-free, highly flexible knees and into the arms of Lara, as the capacity crowd roared their approval.
    When I woke the following morning I was breathing on a ventilator and Lara was holding my