The Death of William Posters Read Online Free PDF Page B

in a day, and the shell-shock was rippling. Out in his fast car he’d had nowhere to go, except home to say it was all finished. He was on the main road after the soldier’s lift, doing ninety and dashing around like a tomcat after its own bollocks, tart wild and pub crazy after a stretch of high-fidelity that he’d stood so long because he was temporarily dead, thinking: ‘I go round in circles, as if in some past time I’ve had a terrible crash, and the more I drive in circles the more I’m bleeding to death. I don’t feel this bleeding to death because it’s slow and painless (almost as if it’s happening to another man and I’m not even looking on, but am reading about it in a letter from a friend hundreds of miles away) but I know it’s happening because my eyes get tired and I’m fed up to my spinal marrow, while the old rich marrow I remember is withering and turning black inside me. But perhaps it isn’t completely bad, because if I thought it was I’d flick this steering wheel enough to hit that fence or pillar box and flake myself to a scrap of cold meat under the soil and greenwood tree. Maybe you can get better from it, because I can’t have lost enough blood if I could get in with that woman last night and hump into bed with her. And perhaps I’ve still got blood in me if I feel it running out of me.’
    A paraffin upright stood in the corner, warming the room, perpetuating the smell of tea just made and drunk. Someone walked along the road, whistling. A van drummed by. ‘It’s quiet here,’ he said.
    â€˜I don’t notice it usually, but when I do, I like it.’
    â€˜I’ve never been in a house so quiet. I worked in a factory where you can’t even hear yourself shout. I had a wife and two kids, and a house where you couldn’t even hear yourself think above the news being read, or someone yapping about Homo or Wazz.’
    â€˜That’s modern life,’ she said. ‘Would you rather work in a field?’
    â€˜That ain’t why I’m on the run. I don’t mind noise at work – though I notice you haven’t got a television set.’ Out of the factory his face had changed, away from Nottingham and the pubs. It wasn’t that his expression had lost self-assurance or his body its confident walk, but his actions were slower, his smile more uncertain. It made him look older, as if thought preceded even the movement of his hands bringing the cigarette up to his mouth, as if his smile or frown was backed by an unfathomable depth of reasoning. ‘Maybe I’m on the run to find out why I’m on the run,’ he grinned, feeling foolish at making such a twisted statement.
    â€˜Perhaps that’s why everybody goes on the run,’ she said. ‘I think you’re probably right.’ He was surprised and flattered that she took it seriously. She was fascinated at flashes of complexity in a mind she had imagined as too simple to take seriously. So far, he could only see the mechanics of how he’d gone on the run, rather than the cause. She had used the phrase, and he wondered if the time would come when it no longer applied, when he would be going to, and not away from, something. He’d got back to Nottingham, after so much driving around, and felt like using his feet. He parked his car up a side street off Alfreton Road, and the sky was less blue, white clouds hanging around the chimney stacks of Radford Baths. He yearned to let his legs walk, maybe carry him where a car could never go.
    Narrow, winding and mildewed, he’d lived in these streets once upon a long time ago, and hovering odours made different air to that in the windswept well-spread estates. He’d hardly noticed such change in the oblivious one-track of getting married. It was amazing how quickly he’d fallen in, but years had gone by before clarifying his vision of it.
    After the landmarks of