The Bottle Factory Outing Read Online Free PDF

distant tipsy singing of Irishmen leaving the public house on the corner. From the embankment
     came the low demented wail of the express as it left London for the North.
    ‘Don’t you miss the country?’ Freda asked. ‘The long quiet nights?’
    ‘It wasn’t quiet,’ said Brenda, thinking of the cries of sheep, the snapping of twigs in the hedge as cattle blundered in
     the dark field, the tiny scratchings of shrews on the oilcloth of the kitchen shelf. ‘Once his mother locked me in the barn
     with the geese.’
    ‘Whatever for?’
    ‘She just did. She shouted things outside and threw stones at the tin roof. The geese didn’t like it.’
    ‘What things?’
    ‘This and that.’
    ‘What did he say when you told him?’
    ‘I didn’t. I didn’t like.’
    ‘You know,’ cried Freda, sitting up in bed and dislodging the faded pink eiderdown, ‘you’re a born victim, that’s what you
     are. You ask for trouble. One day you’ll go too far.’ She lay down again and rubbed her toes together to warm them. ‘It’s
     probably all that crouching you did under dining-room tables during the war.’
    ‘I never. I was never a war baby.’ Brenda wished she would stop getting at her. Freda had a way of talking late at night that
     unwound her and sent her off into sleep while Brenda was left wide awake and anxious.
    ‘It did make sense,’ said Freda. ‘The tall man and the journey.’
    ‘That dress …’ Brenda said.
    ‘I don’t get that. I’m not keen on white.’
    ‘It’s a wedding dress,’ said Brenda.
    All night Freda heaved and flounced beyond the line of books and the bolster encased in red satin. She flung her arm across
     the pillow and trapped strands of Brenda’s hair. From her throat, as she dreamed, came the gurgleof unintelligible words. Brenda huddled on the extreme edge of the bed, holding her share of the blankets in both fists,
     staring at the cream-painted door shimmering in the light of the street lamp. She remembered her husband coming home from
     the Legion, dragging her from bed to look at the moon through a telescope. She hated treading through the wet grass with
     the hem of her nightgown clinging to her ankles and him belching from his intake of Newcastle brown ale. He balanced the
     telescope on the stone wall and held it steady while she squatted shivering, leap-frog fashion, amidst the nettles, and squinted
     up at the heavens. The size of the moon, magnified and close, appalled her; she shrank from its size and its stillness, as
     it hung there like some great golf ball struck into the clouds. She shut her eyes at the memory, and unbidden came a picture
     of the grey farmhouse she had left, the glimmer of birch trees down by the stream, the vast curve of the worn and ancient
     moors rolling beyond the yard. It had been spring when she had gone there as a bride: there were lambs lying limp in the field,
     and he had freshly painted the window-sills for her and the rain barrel and the five-barred gate leading on to the moor. Her
     wedding dress, chosen and paid for by her mother, had been of cream lace with a little cloth hat to match, sewn with lillies
     of the valley. She wanted to wear a string of simple daisies about her neck, but Mother said she didn’t have to look like
     a fool even if she was one. At the reception, when she stood with her new husband, Stanley, to greet their guests, his mother
     had leaned forwards to kiss her on the cheek and bitten her ear.
    She dozed and woke as Freda turned violently, tumbling books over the curve of the dividing bolster. It happened every night,
     the pitching of books into Brenda’s half of the bed, and she lay with them digging into her shoulder and her hip, making no
     effort to dislodge them, her hands thrust into the pockets of her overcoat for warmth. At five the bed quivered as the tube
     train began to rumble beneath the waking street. Across the park the gibbons in the zoo leapt to the top of their wire cages
     and began