The Parasite Person Read Online Free PDF

it,Beatrice’s pleased, tentative little giggle which meant that someone had just said something outrageous which she, Beatrice, would have loved to say if she’d dared.
    Martin knew well enough who the someone must be; but for confirmation he crept across the landing and leaned over the banister.
    The light was still on in the hall, just as he’d left it, and from his vantage point he could see the two hairdos from which flimsy headscarves, glistening with rain, had just been removed: Beatrice’s threadbare perm, and the dark, shining up-piled edifice that belonged to Marjorie Pocock, Beatrice’s evil genius from over the road. Not content with making life hell for her own husband, Marjorie was for ever in and out here, inciting Beatrice to make life hell for hers…. Martin watched the two heads move apart as coats were hung up, then swing close again as the pair made their way, still giggling, out into the kitchen. Through the open door, he could hear taps being turned on, a kettle being filled, the clink of crockery … the silent white-lit kitchen was coming alive now, for them ….
    Footsteps. Little thuds and clatterings. More giggling. The scrape of a chair … the door of the fridge opening and then shutting … a low murmur of voices … and then a little shriek of merriment from Beatrice.
    How dare she! For him, she had nothing but complaints and tears and ugly, whining recriminations; and now here she was screaming with merry laughter in the company of this interfering, mischief-making bitch!
    Bitch! Both of them, bitches!
    And what’s more, he could guess who it was they were bitching about. Him.

CHAPTER III
    “M ARTIN , DARLING , LISTEN . This Ledbetter girl—the bit where she denies ever having been depressed. I’m just wondering—if you’d maybe probed a bit more at that point …? I mean, we do know, don’t we, that she did have treatment for depression, it’s in her record….”
    Helen, from her seat at the typewriter, had swivelled round to face him, pushing her soft blonde hair back from her forehead in a familiar self-deprecating gesture: a gesture that seemed to say that the criticism she was voicing was merely a blonde, fluffy sort of criticism, unworthy of an important man’s attention. When in fact it was nothing of the sort, but right on the ball.
    “I don’t know—perhaps I’m just being stupid?” she continued, knowing that she was not. “Perhaps I missed some of the preliminary data …?”
    She hadn’t missed a thing, naturally. Martin, slumped at the breakfast table, still in his dressing-gown, still eating, felt at a hideous disadvantage. It was barely ten past eight, and here she was, fully dressed, lipstick in place, and all agog to finish the typing of this interview before she left for work. Her eagerness to be a help to him at this hour in the morning was terrifying, it absolutely made his stomach churn, but of course he couldn’t say so because it was so marvellous of her to be doing it at all, fitting it in somehow before going off to her rather gruelling teaching job, at which she had to arrive on the dot of nine.
    Reluctantly, Martin gulped down the dregs of his coffee and raised his bleary eyes. He just couldn’t think at this hour of the day, the evenings were his time for thinking. Intelligentquestions while he was still spreading marmalade on his last piece of toast simply made him feel ill. Why couldn’t she be rushing round the flat looking for handbags and things, like other women?
    “I don’t mean,” Helen continued, pushing her hair back yet again, and beginning to talk faster and faster, as if gathering speed for the running jump she was going to have to take over his morning lethargy. “I don’t mean that there’s necessarily any discrepancy . After all, a girl like that—a slightly unbalanced girl—might easily find herself denying, even in her own mind, that …”
    Martin’s early morning brain buzzed like a telephone that hasn’t even