Tough, Tough Toys for Tough, Tough Boys Read Online Free PDF Page B

flint-knapped houses kneeling behind low walls, with peeling paint on their lintels, window frames and doors. The shutters on the windows of the small parade of shops were mostly rolled down. It was Wednesday, early closing in Inwardleigh. Have to buy everything in Khan's, thought Jonathan.
    He passed by the window of Ancient Estates. The photographs which depicted properties for sale or rent were curling up like the eaves of pagodas. Jonathan sighed. Some of the asking prices were ridiculously low, Mars Bar money really. But then no one much wanted to live in Inwardleigh and its environs, where self-abuse was rife and the vet shot up his own horse tranquilliser.
    Some way to the north and east of Inwardleigh a vast nuclear power station crouched on a lip of shingle and dune abutting the North Sea. The station hummed both sub- and ultrasonically. Its very size made it paradoxically invisible, as if its presence were quite simply too monumental to be apprehended.
    Almost daily Jonathan would drive up there and walk out along the beach below the power station. The thing was so vast as to defy human scale, or even purpose. The reactor hall, a great dome coated in some ceramic material, was scored into so many panels, or cells, like the compound eye of Moloch. It sat on a murkily iridescent plinth. The whole was frequently wreathed in tissuey steam, sea mist, even low-hung cloud. At night the place was orange floodlit, and at all hours it echoed and crackled with amplified announcements. Announcements for whom? And by whom? He never saw any of the workers. Perhaps there weren't any; and the place was talking to itself, soliloquising while the brown waves slapped the shingle, the violet butterflies tumbled on the tips of the dune grasses and the geese honked overhead.
    Inwardleigh was outflanked by the two mighty pylon lines which leapt from the power station, marched over the gorse and scrub and passed either side of the town, giving it a wide berth as if anxious to avoid being netted in for a quiz night at the Flare Path, or a cake-bake at the Methodist Hall.
    These behemoth lyres, strung with lethal strings, sang the life out of the town and its environs, made them feel scorched, irradiated, scarious and desiccated. And so the working-class trippers and the middle-class weekenders steered clear of Inwardleigh, heading for the twee villages further up the coast.
    Yet for Jonathan the pylon lines were part of the district's appeal. They provided what little relief the countryside possessed, for this was an area of low, rolling farm land, studded with dense copses and gouged with gravel pits dug from the sandy soil. It was a landscape of ingress and of repose: a tired body lying down on an old, horsehair mattress.
    In Khan's Jonathan moved up and down the aisles putting bits of stuff in his wire basket. Joy had been gone two days and there were two more before she would return. Could he be bothered to cook something proper for himself, or would he go to the pub for fish and chips again that evening? He stood, hand hovering over a small freezer full of eugenic vegetables and macerated, frozen beef, lost in thoughts of the kitchen at the cottage.
    If he cooked and didn't vigorously clean afterwards he could be guaranteed an invasion of insect life. Should he bother therefore? But to not cook was to counsel defeat, to acknowledge the unsustainability of life at the cottage. That, or maybe only its unsustainability without Joy.
    The cottage was small. The summer heat percolated it entirely, forcing its way through the gaps in the dusty, velveteen curtains. Even if Jonathan kept them drawn throughout the day, it was still hot enough in his study for the sweat dripping from his fingers to gum up the keyboard of the Macintosh. And then there were the flies. Jonathan didn't think of himself as squeamish or phobic about insects, but this long, hot summer had brought the six-legged kine out in force.
    Every room in the cottage had its own,