We Are Now Beginning Our Descent Read Online Free PDF Page B

red stone in the middle of town. Kellas had grown up in one like it on the mirror side of Scotland, on the north-east. It must have seemed to adult visitors then like the M’Gurgan place seemed to him now, with the same unbalanced, clashing, comfortable slew of furniture, home-painted sticks from the auctions and the one good sofa, scuffed walls with crayon marks, the fortune in derelict toys and electronics stacked in dusty piles on wardrobe tops. There was a working light bulb in every room, but not always a lampshade around it. Clothes of all ages and sizes were drying in at least two rooms and any place not immediately accessible to a simple vacuum cleaner had a miniature rockfall of bran flakes and plastic soldiers uncleared against it. Kellas and M’Gurgan had been at school together for six years before they left Duncairn and M’Gurgan, who’d lived in an almost bookless bungalow in one of the new estates by the Aberdeen road, envied the Kellas bookshelves, spread along hallways, hung under ceilings and crammed between chimney breasts. He ran his hand back and forth against the spines of an old set of Dickens that had belonged to Kellas’s grandfather, swore when he saw how Kellas’s mother had repaired with insulating tape a first edition of Deaths and Entrances from the same collection, and pressed his nose against the pages of an early Alice in Wonderland . He ran his nostril up the margin and inhaled, lifted his face, big and rosy already at fourteen years old, grinned tillhis cheeks dimpled and said to Kellas: ‘I feel like I just sniffed the Reverend Charles Dodgson’s stash of young girls’ knickers.’ This was beyond Kellas at the time. After M’Gurgan had gone, he took the book to his room and sniffed the pages till he sneezed but couldn’t and didn’t want to believe that girls’ underwear smelled of damp basements. In Dumfries, M’Gurgan the patriarch, by his own boast, wanted to emulate and surpass the Kellas family home library and had done so. Every hallway was narrowed by bookshelves, books ran along the tops of doorways, books advanced in steps up the wall beside the staircase, lined the windowsills and occupied the flat tops of toilet cisterns. M’Gurgan wrote in the half-converted attic, in a tiny cell walled-in by books and lit by a well of sky from a roughly glassed-over hole punched in the roof.
    Dinner was unlike the Kellas dinners of his childhood. The television didn’t stand at the head of the table, it was absent from the kitchen where the M’Gurgans ate. The table was loud, busy and brawly, illuminated by fights between the two M’Gurgan daughters from his first marriage and the son and by decent wine. M’Gurgan insisted that the children, who were aged from eleven to sixteen, drank wine. He poured them each full glasses, topped off with a finger of tap water. Sophie watched without saying anything, waiting for her husband’s folly to meet its natural punishment. M’Gurgan proposed a toast to Kellas and raised his glass. Kellas and Sophie raised theirs and the children, as if by prior agreement, sat with their arms crossed, staring at their father.
    ‘Children, I’d really appreciate it if you’d raise your glasses and drink a toast to our friend Adam, who’s come all the way from London to see us, and who’s going to Afghanistan next week,’ said M’Gurgan.
    ‘He hasn’t come to see us, he’s come to see you and Sophie,’ said Angela. ‘What would he be coming to see me for? I’m a fourteen-year-old schoolgirl and he’s a forty-year-old man.’
    ‘Thirty-seven,’ said Kellas.
    ‘Like there’s a difference,’ said Angela, looking steadfastly and dangerously at her father. ‘I’m going to tell at school that you’re getting me drunk and pimping me out to old men.’ Carrie, the older girl, glanced at Kellas and giggled.
    ‘Angela, I don’t want you using that gangster language,’ said Sophie.
    ‘What’s pimping?’ said the boy,