The Kiln Read Online Free PDF Page B

observation post went into action, assessing the range. He knew where the next attack was coming from. She was shifting position to hit him where he was weakest, as the successful provider, the man who was all for his family. She was also bringing Brian in behind her (she already had Elspeth) with the heavy artillery. The big guns of ‘career consolidation’ were trundling behind her.
    ‘Look at the husband she has.’
    He needed a pre-emptive strike. First obliterate Elspeth - one fewer to worry about. Then a diversionary tactic.
    ‘Oh, Jesus, Jesus Christ!’ he said. Elspeth took both barrels and spoke no more. ‘Before this conversation finishes up being conducted in Sanskrit. Two things. I didn't say Sandra was ugly. And I'd rather not look at Ted Hayes. If I can help it.’
    ‘What? Is there something wrong with Ted Hayes now?’
    It had worked. He concealed his success under exasperation.
    ‘Holy bejesus!’
    ‘It's incredible.’
    ‘Hear, hear.’
    ‘It's incredible. According to you, there's something wrong with everybody. God and I both feel . . .’ She hit home there. It wasn't that he thought there was something wrong with everybody but he couldn't see the amazing rightness that everybody else seemed to see. He was aware of an awful lot wrong with him - but what exactly? Gill was always ready to help him with that one. ‘You're a creep. You don't approve of Ted Hayes either? Is there something wrong with him?’
    ‘Aye! As a matter of fact there is. He would bore the shite out you at a hundred yards. That's what's wrong with him. Ifthey bottled him, they could sell him in Boots the chemist. As a bloody sedative!’
    ‘No, you wouldn't approve of him, would you?’
    ‘He's a uxorious wee turd.’
    ‘Oh, we're on the Eng. Lit. words now, are we? “Uxorious.” But the last one let you down a bit, didn't it? Like a birthmark. Uxorious! That just means he's nice to his wife. Doesn't it? Of course, I can see how that would be an insult in your vocabulary.’
    ‘What it means is he runs after her like a wee waiter. He probably bottles her farts for posterity. He needs her round him like an oxygen tent. If she goes out the room for five minutes, poor wee bugger's gaspin’ for breath.'
    He was cresting the hill of his rage like Alaric the Goth. But suddenly Rome was shut for the night. Gill sat back without warning and sighed and shook her head with something that looked like sad contentment. It seemed she hadn't been taking part in an argument, just a demonstration. He stood fully caparisoned with no enemy in sight, only some bemused tourists thinking: ‘Look at that funny man. Why is he so excited?’
    Childe Roland had come to the dark tower and set his slug-horn to his lips and the tower had disappeared. Hm. Well. All he could think of to do was give the solitude he found himself in a final defiant blast.
    ‘Anyway,’ Gill was saying to Elspeth and Brian. ‘They seem happy. Their lives are completely unruffled.’
    ‘So they should be,’ he said, unnecessarily loudly. ‘They're as good as dead. Nothing out of the ordinary's ever going to happen there. Any time life comes near wee Ted, it falls asleep.’
    The room went quiet.
    AS QUIET AS A ROOM IN EDINBURGH , to which his seemingly incurable discontent with things would bring him. He stared at the fading, leafy pattern on the carpet. It might have been an old forest he was lost in. Was there some wrong turning he had taken when he was young? Perhaps seeing so many films in hisboyhood and adolescence had helped to confuse him about who he was. Maybe his multiple-identity problem came, in the first place, from growing up in a small town where there were seven cinemas.
    There was the Plaza and there was the Empire and the Regal and the Palace and the Savoy and the George and the Forum. He found something appropriate in the grandeur of the names, the way they resonated in his head. For these were embassies of world experience located in his home