The Yellow Glass Read Online Free PDF Page A

other teen-agers, pony-tailed girls included, and several men
for whom Bill Haley and His Comets would not have been their scene.   It was an older man wearing a pork pie hat
and a short car-coat who was waving the gun about.   He shouted something but, thankfully, we
weren’t quite close enough to hear; had we been, we’d probably have been
riddled with bullets.   I imagine he
wished us to stop, but that wasn’t going to happen, not in a month of Sundays;
we weren’t stopping for anything .
    We had run underneath a railway bridge when it became
clear that we needed a change of plan.   They were gaining on us, you see - I wasn’t as fit as my uncle and was
bursting with lack of breath - and the man had taken another pot-shot and the
open green space of a park to our right offered scant protection and I couldn’t
see how we’d ever throw them off.   My
earlier enthusiasm was certainly ebbing away, although I still felt cushioned
by a sense of dream-like unreality; unable to equate the preposterous idea that
somebody was shooting at me with anything I’d ever known in my previous
nineteen years of existence.   When my
uncle came up with a shocker:
    “Can you swim, Rosa?”
    He had to be stark, staring mad.   I was so knocked sideways by the very idea
that I promptly stumbled and dropped my handbag.   Yes, I could swim and was, in fact, a pretty
strong swimmer due to my father’s determination that I should master the
perfect crawl (owing to a near-drowning incident that had happened when I was a
child), but nothing would persuade me to go swimming in the filthy waters of
the Thames.
    “You must be joking!   Haven’t you heard of cholera?”
    He shot me one of his swift, stern glances.
    “Haven’t you heard of a bullet through the head?”
    Then he picked up my beautiful, leather handbag with
the gold clasp and lobbed it into the river.
    “Let’s lose this thing, first off.   Now, skirt, shoes and coat,” he actually
smiled, the madman.   “Last one in’s a
cissy.”
    A bullet squealed over our heads and, this time, it
seemed awfully real, somehow.   I tore my
clothes off in two seconds flat and made straight for the water.  
    It was hideously cold before I’d even made the plunge,
but I’d less than a heartbeat of sheer revulsion, of shivering on the shore
with the tails of my blouse barely covering my stocking-tops, before he grabbed
my hand and ran with me into the water.   Over the slimy, green stones, through the scum of disintegrating,
splintered wood and detergent froth and unknown horrors hardly worthy of the
noble, Latin terms ‘flotsam’ and ‘jetsam’; it was so unpleasant in every single
way that I very nearly turned around and took a bullet.   And the water was beyond cold, stinging those
bits of me that it could get at, which were more and more, as my uncle dragged
me in and seemed to fling me at the river, loosing me from all bearings until I
was all alone, trying to remember my perfect crawl.   It was horrible . . and then . . it wasn’t.
    Because the magic happened, the magic that only water
can conjure.   Everything that was
unpleasant and shiver-making transformed into its opposite as I swam.   Even my lungs expanded, so that I was able to
breathe properly; it felt like the longest time since I’d taken a proper
breath.   The Thames spread out a silver
pattern upon her black surface, a path for me to follow through her immense
treasury of water.   There, ahead of me,
was my uncle’s head - his well-oiled black hair making him look like a bobbing
seal - turning to see how I was doing.   I
think I actually laughed.   All at once
there was so incredibly much space; for the sky seemed to unwrap above the
river as if only here did it have the freedom to show itself.   Were there stars over London?   I’d never noticed them before.   Or were they streaks of sleet snow,
glittering against so much black?
    I swam as if it were the easiest thing in the world,
not