This Is How It Ends Read Online Free PDF Page A

would explain. Everyone wants to live beside the sea.
    As Bruno strolled along the footpath, he took in the manicured driveways. He registered the multiple German cars squashed into the small front gardens. The fresh paintwork on the windows. Bruno grew up in a seaside town. He knows these windows would need to be painted every other year.
    Some of the houses are numbered and some of them aren’t. Some of them have names rather than numbers, names like Vista Mar and Rusheen. When Bruno comes upon a numbered house he takes it as his guide. He looks right and left to find out which way the numbers are going. Then he counts his way along, allocating a number to each unnumbered house he passes. He counts them down one at a time, there’s only one side to this street. When he comes across another numbered house he has a little moment of satisfaction. He’s right on track.
    He must be getting close now, he’s only a few houses away. He walks past a low bungalow set back a bit from the road. The next houses he comes to are laid out in a small terrace, four of them in a row. Tall and elegantly proportioned, each house has a wide flight of stone steps leading up to the hall door.
    The first house in the terrace has been painted a pale pink, the next one a light dusky blue. Seaside colors, they look pretty up against each other, the contrast is nice. But the next house he comes to is unpainted, its façade a dull gray stone. It has none of the cheerfulness of its neighbors. It’s a numbered house, there are peeling white numbers stuck inside the fanlight over the front door.
    This is the house of his cousins.
    Bruno stands for a moment at the gate. He notices the weeds sneaking through the gravel in the driveway, the battered little car parked over beside the basement drop. The chipped black paintwork on the railings and the lichen-clustered steps. He looks up at the impenetrable black windows, two upstairs and one down.
    As he stands there he sees a movement in the downstairs window. He peers, trying to figure out if there’s someone there or if it’s just a trick of the light. But he can’t make out anything at all. All he can see is opaque glass, the stubborn reflection of the sky glinting back at him.
    Then he comes to his senses. He realizes he’s standing there on the sidewalk, staring into their house. He shouldn’t be staring. There might be someone in there, they might be able to see him. He turns away quickly, rushing along the sidewalk, like someone escaping a crime scene. Only when he reaches the corner does he stop. He looks each way to check the traffic, then he crosses the road, slipping through the gap in the wall and out onto the promenade.
     
    HE’S TIRED.
    He realizes this as he flops down onto a bench, he’s tired to the bone. He’s so tired he could lie down right here and fall asleep, like a vagrant. Nobody knows him here, nobody would care.
    Even so, he can’t do it. No matter how tempting it is, he forces himself to stay upright, sinking down into his padded jacket for comfort. One of the strangest times in his life, he’s completely at sea. He doesn’t know what to be doing with himself.
    He’s been sleeping during the day. He’s been going back to his room in the bed-and-breakfast, with the purpose of reading for a few hours, with the purpose of resting. But the next minute he’ll find himself in a kind of waking coma. Like he’s been given an anesthetic but he can still hear what the doctors are saying.
    He sleeps, and yet he’s aware of being asleep. How can that be? How can you be asleep and yet at the same time aware of the degrading sensation of the side of your face squashed against the pillow? Aware of the hard waistband of your jeans digging into your hipbones. Aware of being cold but still unable to climb under the bedspread. Somewhere, way down below him, he’s aware of daily life going on. A vacuum starts and stops. A telephone rings and rings. Bruno lies there and