The Long Stretch Read Online Free PDF Page A

student. Told me to go fuck myself over something. I guess I didn’t react with the kind of restraint you’re supposed to have these days. Gave him a little…push.”
    I bet.
    “He’s out for the rest of the term, of course.” He reaches for a cigarette. “Anyway, I’m figuring on packing in the teaching after this year. Not my cuppa anymore.”
    “So what’ll you do?”
    He shrugs.
    “Funny,” I say. “Never thought I’d see you on the shitty end of the stick for a change.”
    “You want to talk about it?” he asks.
    “No.”
    He says: “Really. I want to straighten things out with all the people who matter to me around here.”
    “There’s nothing to straighten out.”
    “Well,” he says. “Maybe the fact she and I went…you know…aren’t…anymore. That clears one thing out of the way maybe.”
    “It’s been out of the way a long time now. If you’d checked before,” I say.
    “Well, that’s good,” he says. Smiling, waiting.
    I’m setting the table. The storm is building a wall around the house. Trees raising an uproar, like waves breaking on shore.
    “I know there’s a lot more,” he says.
    “I read the book.”
    “There is the book.” He nods. “And there’s also the day itself.”
    “A school day like all the others,” I say. “It was Aggie MacNeil told me. Aggie, who taught you everything you know about writing. She was the one that told me. ‘Poor President Kennedy.’”
    “I don’t mean that,” he says quietly. “I mean what happened at Ceiteag’s place that afternoon. What happened to—”
    “Leave it alone,” I bark.
    “I know you’ve thought a lot about it,” he persists. “Where it originated. Something between himself and Angus. And the war. And a woman.”
    “But I don’t have to talk about it,” I say. “I don’t want to talk about it. Nobody wants to talk about it since you wrote about it. It’s all behind us.”
    “Some of us have a responsibility to the future.”
    “Well, good luck to you and your future.”
    Bringing him here was a mistake. Bringing him and her and all the rest of them with him. People I thought to be safely away or secure in cemeteries. Future, my arse.
    “Let’s just let sleeping dogs lie,” I say.
    Then he smiles, the one that got him all the things he has, all the places he has been, and is.
    “Pour me something and then let’s get those steaks under way.”
    You have to laugh.

1
    He ate supper like a starved person, face close to his food. Finally shoved his plate away, straightened up, sighed, burped, then tilted his chair back.
    “A regular five-star chef,” he says. “You must do something with the calories, to look that fit.”
    “I run a bit,” I say.
    “You gotta like…isolation,” he says.
    “Maybe.”
    The wine goes down like water. You forget how much you enjoy a good glass of wine.
    “ Loneliness and the Long-Distance Runner. You must have read that?”
    I never heard of it.
    “Believe it or not, I slept with a woman who slept with the guy who wrote that.”
    I should care.
    “About five years ago.”
    “Effie slept with him?”
    He laughs. “No, no, no. Somebody else. Just after I left Effie. In ‘78.”
    “It’s been that long.” I am surprised.
    “Five years,” he says. “You must have laughed your hole out.”
    “Didn’t mean much by then.”
    He stares at me for a moment.
    “Alex something,” he says.
    “Who?”
    “That writer. I had a whole bunch of short relationships after I…moved on.”
    “Yes,” I say. Cutting it off.
    “It’s good that we can talk about it.”
    “It was a long time ago,” I say. I avoid his eyes.
    “Alan…something. Stivel or…Stiletto. No.”
    I look back at him blankly.
    “That writer’s name. It’ll come to me.”
    Out in Hastings, down below his place, there was the remains of an old coal pier. Near where the railway station used to be. It’s all gone now. In my time it was a high black rickety structure of old timbers, great for