The Temporary Read Online Free PDF

air was warm with the rank perfume of their take-away dinner.
    ‘Dad, I’m reading,’ Ralph would implore, raising his bookby the covers as if to shield him from the eye-watering woodsmoke of his father’s recollections.
    ‘Ah, yes,’ his father would confirm, nodding. ‘But a boy your age shouldn’t have to turn to books for company. He should be outdoors with other boys engaging in some form of organized activity.’ He would sigh and put his arms behind his head, like a man on holiday. ‘What do you say we play a hand of whist?’
    ‘Dad, I’m reading .’
    Once Ralph witnessed his father getting into a fight – or failing to get out of it, in any case – in a pub in Worthington where they had gone one evening for pie and chips and where Ralph was permitted to drink his lemonade from a pint glass identical to that from which his father sipped beer with womanly daintiness. Ralph had deliberately left the translucent spume on his lip while his father wiped his own away, watching him closely as he ate and drank.
    ‘Is it good?’ he said after each mouthful. Ralph nodded. ‘Never leave a moustache,’ he counselled, handing Ralph a paper napkin. ‘A gentleman never leaves a moustache.’
    Already his father had begun to deliver his epithets in the defensive manner with which he touted Terylene, at once sheepish and proud.
    ‘A gentleman,’ he repeated, ‘never has a sloppy lip.’
    It was shortly afterwards that he saw his father, gone to the bar to refill their glasses, borne away from his view in a sudden clutch of strangers and swept out through the double doors of the pub beyond into the street, his bald pate bobbing as if suspended in water. Ralph had thought to follow him out, but the barmaid had come to the table with his second pint glass of lemonade and had instructed him kindly to drink it. He had done so while she watched, drinking it all down in one go as he had seen other men do until she had laughed and told him he’d burst if he carried on like that; and what withall the excitement he had quite forgotten about his father until he emerged back through the doors with his shirt hanging out and his cheeks flushed dark red in a grotesque approximation of youth and vitality.
    ‘A word of advice, Ralphie,’ he had said, sitting down heavily beside him. His belly heaved in and out frantically. ‘Never show your wallet at the bar. Temptation, you see. The smart fellow always takes out a single note in advance.’
    Ralph asked him if you could make yourself burst by drinking too much all in one go.
    ‘Well, let’s see,’ said his father after a pause, furrowing his brow and screwing up his eyes intently. His upper lip glistened with sweat. He shook his head. ‘I don’t think it’s likely. No, I don’t think it’s likely at all.’
    Ralph would read in the evenings, devouring the pages of library books while his father dozed before the television with a hotel tooth-mug filled with whisky. Sometimes the empty glass would slip from his hand and he would wake with a start as it thumped to the floor.
    ‘Must have dozed off,’ he would apologize, rubbing his eyes and smiling crookedly. ‘Good book, Ralphie?’
    ‘Quite good.’
    ‘Ah, I see. What’s the plot?’
    He crossed the lock and plunged into a sea of stalls, through crowds whose lumpy shopping bags thumped against his calves, past Indian men selling garish explosions of clothing and girls with dead eyes and chalky faces around which shreds of hair hung like seaweed. He headed down towards the fruit market, craving the perishability of its offerings. When he reached it the market was noisy, a field of combat where red-faced stallholders shouted like disgruntled babies while produce which seemed overly bright was fondled by people who evidently weren’t.
    ‘Can’t you read?’ roared one of them, as a woman in agrubby knitted hat ran her fingers over a hill of oranges, touching them delicately like a blind person. She started at the