The Temporary Read Online Free PDF Page A

felt better after his bath – could still feel its warm embraceon him – remodelled and fit for action. A determination to leave his mark on the day had driven him from the dragging influence of the flat, and he turned towards Chalk Farm Road filled with purposeful but undirected energy. In the distance he could see the brimming pavements flowing towards Camden Town and a plan to go to the market formulated itself, convincing Ralph that he had intended to do so all along.
    The sun was bright but weak and gave the day a deceptive appearance, casting a patina of warmth which did not convert the essential coolness of the air. The naked trees lining the road strained towards the light, greedy for its faint catalyst to burst them prematurely into bloom. It was spring, Ralph supposed, that long and amorphous season into which winter would occasionally recover and summer remit like a lingering low-level illness, never quite gripping at the throat with certitude. He groped for a date and remembered then that it was still only February. The year stretched before him in all its unavoidable detail, the hundreds of days and thousands of hours which he would endure as if something more lay at their end than mere repetition. He wished that he could be tricked, as others seemed to be, by the close of each week, seeing in their false endings the imminence of some sort of conclusion, like a soap opera. He wondered why he had never fallen into step with this pattern of days, comprehended in the helpful clarity of a week’s tiny eras – birth, growth, productivity , decline, dormancy, regeneration, played out beneath the celestial presence of longer phases of weather – a system which might ease the slow construction of his life. The year he had spent alone with his father, a chaotic tract across which no borders of time or habit were erected, had become in its elasticity the infinitely capacious repository of Ralph’s failings and he placed this latest grudge firmly within it. How could he, who had spent the most formative year of his youth, theyear in which he was most pliant, most liable to gel in whichever crazy mould was nearest to hand, had spent that year ‘on the road’, a hostage to his father’s misfortune; how could he, then, be expected to see things as other people did?
    He fed himself from the tributary of his street into the main concourse drifting towards the lock, and in the suddenly thick press of bodies felt his exposure ease as they gathered him in. He had had days like this before, days when his spirits would gutter or flare at each movement of life, when he wrestled hourly with his recollections, at once their victim and their hero. It was good that he was out, although even here in the open air his father’s eyes were on him, shrivelled with whisky and immolated desire. He felt their reproach, as he always did when shrugging off portions of himself into the complaining vacuum of his absence. The problem was that it wasn’t a vacuum at all. He was merely relocating things he disliked about himself, slapping up hasty walls around them, building twisted, ridiculous corridors, papering over their leaks. He had complicated himself with introspection. He felt a longing to demolish it all and start again. His father had been a master of evasion, blockading all routes to the past, bricking up vistas of the future, until all that was left of him was a tiny room in which a man sat in an armchair watching television. He had once been a boy scout, though; the only photograph Ralph possessed of his father depicted him at the acme of his scouting career, when he had risen from amongst the ranks to become their general. He wore a cap and cravat, and stared out beyond the lens with triumphant eyes as if towards vanquished hordes. Later, his mind would travel back to that glittering epoch and he would endeavour gently to tell Ralph of it, in a hotel room where rivers of Terylene cascaded from the mouths of his suitcases and the