Talking to Strange Men Read Online Free PDF Page A

sake, you’ve got both parents doctors and you think they wouldn’t know about a thing like that? The whole family are giants. Ian’s taller than you. Dad’s taller than you.’
    â€˜Yes, but Ian’s twenty and God knows how old Dad is, about fifty.’
    â€˜I didn’t ask you how old you were because I thought you were too tall. I asked because I was wondering how you felt about Spookside.’
    â€˜We don’t call it that any more,’ Mungo said rather loftily. ‘What do you mean, how do I feel?’
    Angus had an air of choosing his words carefully. ‘I mean are you still keen?’
    â€˜Sure I am. Of course. Why?’
    â€˜Well . . . Nothing. You’re only fourteen. OK, forget it. There’s Mum. I heard the car.’
    Mungo went up to his own room. It was gradually returning to the state which prevailed in the holidays, the order of term time (which had appalled him when he looked on it two days before) quickly giving place to a comfortable chaos. Mungo liked to drop his clothes on to the floor when he took them off and when the pile got too big he took it down to the washing machine in the basement and put thelot in, dark and light together. All his clothes gradually took on the same muddy blue colour as a result of this, which was why his mother snatched his school shirts off him on the day Rossingham broke up. His room was a crow’s nest up here, the ceiling sloping, following the lines of the roof. It was so big because a hundred years before it was shared by the four maids who kept the house clean. The two windows were round, set under eyelid dormers, and from them you could see over the tops of leafless trees across old slate roofs and new tiled roofs to that wonderful view.
    Unease troubled Mungo, slightly marring what had been a happy and busy day. It’s because of what Ang said, he thought. What did he mean? Why had he said that? After all, it was he who began it, he and Guy Parker, he who handed it on, a finished and beautiful thing, to his heirs. Mungo liked that phrase and he repeated it to himself. A finished and beautiful thing to his heirs. He might become a writer. There was too much of this medicine thing in their family. Could it only be that Angus regretted giving up the directorship himself?
    Mungo dropped his jacket absent-mindedly on to the floor. He picked up a book, turned the pages, considering. Then he pulled the blinds down over the round windows that were a bit like ship’s portholes. His stomach reminded him that his mother was home. There reached him, as he started down the third flight, a scent of Indonesian takeaway, his first favourite.

4
    THE GARDEN CENTRE was on the old by-pass. Once it had been nearer the city centre and then it had been called a nursery. That was when John Creevey first went to work there as a school leaver aged seventeen. In those days he had been the boy who swept up, graduating to become the boy who putthe compost in the seed trays, the ‘nurseryman’, the assistant manager. He was nurseryman when Cherry died and by the time Jennifer came in to buy something suitable for window boxes, Trowbridge’s had doubled its size, called itself a garden centre and moved out to the by-pass. And John was more or less the boss, the then manager being on an extended sick leave that was to become permanent.
    He had recommended fuchsias to Jennifer, plus a couple of pelargoniums, trailing lobelia, white alyssum, the usual stuff, and a canary creeper which was a bit more out of the ordinary.
    â€˜Why is it called that?’
    â€˜Canary creeper?’ he had said. ‘You wait and see. Its flowers look like yellow birds.’
    Those had been the first words they had ever said to each other, apart from the requisite good morning and hallo and can I help you? It all came back to him now because he was in the main greenhouse, checking on the fuchsia cuttings, all in their individual fibre pots.