The Ghost Writer Read Online Free PDF

moustaches, monstrous breasts and grotesque genitals in livid Texta-Colour—you weren't allowed to borrow the art books, but that didn't save them. I turned over
The Last of England
and there was
The Lady of Shalott,
at whom I gazed, transfixed, for many minutes: this was surely Alice.
    Before the afternoon bell rang I had discovered the Pre-Raphaelites, and found at least a dozen more Alices. She seemed to have modelled for the entire Brotherhood, but they weren't all equally good at painting her. Rossetti could do her hair, but he'd given her a mean mouth; Burne-Jones could do her face very well, but the hair wasn't quite right, and besides he'd painted her naked, emerging from a tree, for some reason, with her arms around an almost equally naked youth: I only dared glance at that one and pass hastily on, afraid that Mrs McKenzie the librarian would catch me. Millais's
The Bridesmaid
was close, but I kept turning back to
The Lady of Shalott,
and thinking that if only she could manage to look a little less tragic, the likeness would be perfect.
    I told Alice that same night, and when at last her reply came it turned out that she already knew the picture, and yes, she supposed she did look a bit like the Lady of Shalott, except that she thought her hair was darker than the Lady's, and of course the Lady was much better-looking; whereas I felt certain the comparison was quite the other way round. I invested most of my savings in a book of Waterhouse's pictures, which I managed to smuggle home after one of our rare trips to Mawson Central Shopping Mall. Sex was not merely a taboo subject in our house; we had always lived according to the pretence—made possible by the absence of television and magazines—that no such thing existed. And even though Waterhouse's naked nymphs were Art, I knew my mother would not see them that way, any more than I did.

    A ND THEN I HAD THE DREAM . I T WAS LATE SUMMER, TWO years since we'd started writing. I woke—or so I thought—in bed in my own room, everything the same except that a full moon was shining through my window. A strange moon, because its light was soft and golden, like candlelight, and warm against my face. An impossible moon, because my window faced south and the sky was blotted out by the side of Mr Drukowicz's shed, but in the dream it seemed absolutely right and natural. I lay there for a little while, feeling the warmth of its rays, until I became aware that the source of the warmth, which was now filling my whole body, was much closer than the moon.
    I turned my head on the pillow. Alice lay facing me, smiling the most enchanting smile, a smile of pure joy and tenderness and love. Her head was only a few inches from mine, her red-gold-chestnut hair rippling over the pillow in the candle-moonlight, our bodies not quite touching, and for a small eternity I just lay there, floating in perfect bliss. She did not look exactly like the Lady, or any of the women in the paintings; she was simply Alice, and beautiful, and the warmth of her body flowed into mine as our lips brushed and met and I woke in my wet pyjamas, alone, to the familiar patch of neon from the streetlight spilling across the wall of Mr Drukowicz's shed. It was 1.30 in the morning.
    Always before, scrubbing at my pyjamas and sheets by torchlight, I'd felt nothing but shame and dread that this time—for the stains were always horribly visible in the morning—my mother would say something. But that night I went through the routine almost absent-mindedly, praying that I would float straight back into the dream, and Alice radiant beside me.
    Instead I lay sleepless for a long time, struggling in vain to recapture her face as I had seen it, the glow fading until there were only the faces from the paintings left, and I buried my own face in my pillow and wept.
    As I was finally drifting in and out of sleep, I had another dream, of myself as a very small child, being read to on my mothers knee, in lamplight on our