The Horse With My Name Read Online Free PDF

began to doubt that any newspaper or television programme would make an appearance that day. I didn’t want to phone Mouse. He was my oldest friend, and arguably the best placed of all of them to give me some work, but he’d been giving me a wide berth for months; he’d pulled me out of the deep end once too often. My problem was, every time somebody threw me inflatable armbands I ended up putting them on my feet and going straight back to the bottom. I suppose eventually we all have to sink or swim by our own efforts.
    It could be avoided no longer. His name was the only one I hadn’t tried. If I was to get anywhere that day, and it felt important that I did, there, then, before something else knocked me back, then I had to call him. I paced the room for a while, wondering what to say, how to approach him, whether to apologise or pretend that nothing had happened. I knew why he’d dropped me and he’d every justification, but still. He was Mouse. My friend. He knew what I was like. You expect a little loyalty, or, indeed, a lot. Had I not been there for him, every single time? Well, I would have been if there’d ever been any need. But he was as solid and dependable and unadventurous as a rock. He should have been called Rock. My friend Rock . If only Hudson hadn’t gone and spoilt the name for all time.
    I punched in the numbers. He was now editor of the Belfast Evening News . ‘I’m sorry,’ his secretary said, ‘he’s at a––’
    ‘Funeral.’
    ‘At a funeral. Yes. He won’t be back until––’
    ‘Just answer me one thing. Who the hell is so important every friggin’ journalist in the city is going to make sure he’s dead?’
    There was a little bit of a giggle at the other end. ‘Do you know, I said exactly the same thing. I’ve been working here for five years and I’ve never heard of this fella Corkery.’

4
    It’s usually bad manners to read a book at a funeral, but I had my reasons.
    I arrived late, of course, though not as late as Corkery. In keeping with most of the past year, and more specifically with the manner in which he had met his death, the hearse had managed to impale itself on the back of a trailer as it turned out of the funeral home and it had taken an hour and a half to first free it, then repair the damage. Nor was it simply a case of transferring the coffin to another vehicle. It was a small family firm and their only other car was on duty elsewhere. It would doubtless have tickled us all if Corkery’s last ride had been in the back of a newspaper delivery van, as some had seriously suggested. I heard subsequently that enquiries were made but foundered on the lack of insurance cover, for the van, rather than Corkery, who was a bit beyond it.
    It turned out to be one of the biggest funerals I’d ever attended, the cars spilling out of the car park at Roselawn Crematorium to sit two abreast on the grass all the way back down the lane to the Saintfield Road. The taxi driver dropped me at the gates, said he had a thing about goingthrough them. I had a thing about not giving tips to drivers who stop halfway there; he cursed me, I cursed him, and I hurried through the gates in the rain with a shouted threat not to visit a certain part of Belfast in the near future ringing in my ears. I charged down towards the crematorium, and managed to make it just as they lifted the coffin from the hearse and hurried it through the doors. I stood at the back, looking for a spare seat, but there was none, but I saw Mouse and knew he’d manage to make some space if he saw me coming. There was the usual doomy music playing as I hurried down and across, then backed into the slimmest of gaps. Mouse didn’t bat an eyelid. Just his usual ‘HIYA, DAN,’ impervious to the half-dozen mourners who nearly jumped out of their seats as his voice boomed around the echo chamber that was the setting for Mark Corkery’s final shift.
    ‘Big turn-out,’ I said.
    ‘Give the public what they want . .