Survival of Thomas Ford, The Read Online Free PDF Page B

had to take the weight of something they were both carrying while his father was standing at an awkward, vulnerable angle. At times like that, Jimmy and his father both knew what could happen, in a moment. The father’s trust in his son was more out of convention than conviction. Long ago, Jimmy’s father had understood that something was very wrong with Jimmy, but understanding had to wage a daily battle against parental hope.
    “I’m serious Jimmy. No pissing off at dinner time and not coming back on-site. It’s a fucking embarrassment, these Polish lads breaking their backs every day and then they see you treat your own father like that.”
    Jimmy sneered out his passenger window. He shook his head.
    “What are you shaking your head at? Eh?”

    His father had him rolling a wheelbarrow all morning, guiding it carefully along narrow planks of wood set up high over the mudded earth. He was taking bricks for the Poles to lay. The Poles just ignored him. Jimmy didn’t mind the work. It was a good shoulder workout. He had his tight yellow vest on and he knew the fine striations in his arms would be dancing and twitching under the dull sky as he worked. That’s what Robert didn’t appreciate. A good day’s work would pump some of that medicine shite out of his system. He would feel better. One of the Poles was grinning at Jimmy and saying something.
    “Eh?” said Jimmy.
    The Pole was waving his hands in the air and staring at Jimmy. Jimmy shook his head and grinned back. He looked all around the group of men laying the brick foundation for this cardiologist’s new house.
    “What’s he on about eh?” said Jimmy.
    Most of the men didn’t look up. A couple looked at the gesticulating Pole and shrugged. Jimmy laughed loud.
    “What you don’t know son,” he said to the Pole very slowly and loudly, “is that I am the Gandolfini son! You didn’t know that, did you? I am the Gandolfini!”
    Jimmy tipped the last bricks from the wheelbarrow, near the Pole’s toes. Three of the bricks chipped as they fell and knocked against each other, ruined. The Pole stopped gesticulating and stared at the broken objects. Jimmy waited for the man to look back at him, then he grinned wide, nodded savagely, ploughed the wheelbarrow hard through the mud, swerved it, and headed back to get more bricks.

    At that precise second, Robert was lying in his bed at his mother’s house, staring up at the ceiling. His head didn’t feel right, there was a fuzziness. He closed his eyes and concentrated on the fuzziness. He held his breath. But the fuzziness didn’t clear, if anything it seemed to intensify. There had been no fuzziness beside the loch that day as Jimmy had brought the red Volvo up alongside the lorry, overtaking just before the blind corner. Then Robert had seen the car appear ahead, the faces behind a windscreen. He had known that one face was a man, and the other a woman, but he knew he hadn’t taken a perfect photograph of the scene with his mind, not like Jimmy had done. Robert didn’t see why Jimmy had needed to take the picture of the woman from the newspaper and tape it to the wall above his pillow; Robert knew from experience the perfect instrument that Jimmy’s memory and imagination could be. He wondered if Jimmy hadn’t been trying to dare the universe, or his mum, to take note of the audacity and arrogance represented by the taping of the dead woman’s picture to the wall. But few people, or even cosmic forces, challenged Jimmy. It worried Robert, how much Jimmy got away with. Only Jimmy’s dad seemed to try to get control of him, and then only on occasions.
    Robert laid quietly on the bed and tried to open his nerve-ends, lay them bare to the cosmos. He thought it might be possible for him to sense whether or not he was safe. That is, whether or not some organ or machine of the universe had been set into motion, against Jimmy, because of the woman’s death, and therefore against Robert too, as Jimmy’s