The Walking Stick Read Online Free PDF Page A

behind the seats, and by the time he’d
found it Erica was on us and I had to introduce him. We talked for three or four minutes and then he drove off and we went in.
    ‘Are you on duty tonight?’ I said, hoping to head her off the subject.
    ‘Well, of course, otherwise I should not have been called out. Who’s the young man? Was he bringing you back from Sarah’s?’
    ‘No, he took me to see a film.’
    ‘Odd voice. Where did you meet him?’
    ‘At Sarah’s. He’s an artist.’
    ‘Oh?’ It was a mistake to have told her that. An interest stirred in her voice. ‘Ask him in for drinks some time.’
    ‘Yes . . . some time.’
    We went up the stairs. ‘You really should have more men friends, Deborah. There’s absolutely no reason why not.’
    ‘No. No reason at all.’
    That night I had my old dream back. I dreamed that I was in a coffin but somehow it wasn’t long enough and my head stuck out through a hole in the end. My hands and arms
and legs were tied and I couldn’t move a muscle. People were looking at me – three or four of the undertakers – and I knew that in a matter of minutes I should be buried and the
earth would be shovelled into my mouth. I tried to protest, to scream, to explain that I wasn’t really dead, that only my body was dead and my head and brain were very much alive. Each time I
tried to speak to the undertakers they turned away.
    Then I knew really that it wasn’t just burial they intended but a kind of torture. All the time there was this terrible sound of a great animal breathing: I couldn’t see it but it
was somewhere near; and all the time the men were watching the dials on a kind of clock to see how much pain I could stand. And the pain wasn’t yet there, but I knew , I knew it was
going to start .
    And then one of the undertakers came forward with a long rubber tube and began to push it up my nose, and every now and then he said ‘swallow’ and pushed in a bit more; and then I
had no breath but only pain, no breath to speak, no breath to call out, no breath to exclaim. The weight of burial was on my chest. I was dying, dying; and the pain, the terrible pain, and the
suffocation . . .
    I rocked backward and forward as Erica gripped my shoulder and shook me awake.
    ‘Deborah! You’ll disturb your father!’
    No one, no one who has not suffered such nightmares can understand the inexpressible bliss of waking to find a familiar bed, a familiar room, movement in one’s limbs, easy
breathing, no burial or intended burial, a stern but familiar motherly hand. And no pain anywhere.
    ‘Sorry,’ I said, struggling still. ‘Did I wake you?’
    ‘Yes. You were crying. That awful whimpering sound. It’s only about two o’clock. I must only have just gone off.’
    ‘Sorry, Erica. So sorry. I’ll be all right now.’
    ‘Did you get overexcited tonight?’
    ‘No, not a bit.’
    ‘I wondered if going out with that young man . . . It’s years since you had one of these turns.’
    I struggled up in bed. ‘Don’t call them turns . I’m not having fits or anything. They’re just horrible nightmares. I’m all right now. Sorry to have got
you out of bed. Really, I’ll be all right. Like me to make you a cup of tea?’
    ‘No, no,’ said my mother, horrified. ‘That really would end the night. Tannin is as stimulating as caffeine.’
    I lay back and stretched luxuriously in the bed. Even my bad leg felt cool and comfortable.
    ‘Thank you for coming. I was just being buried alive.’
    ‘ Really , Deborah. Sometimes I think you glory in it.’
    ‘No glory, darling,’ I said. ‘But it’s glory to wake.’

CHAPTER THREE
    I sometimes think that the most threadbare things in the world are yesterday’s smart ideas; and surely one of the most dated of them all is calling one’s parents by
their Christian names. The notion, of course, is that if everyone gets on a matey first-name basis from the start, it helps to abolish the gap between the generations; with