SandDune's Retirement Reading 2022 - Part 1

As they went upstairs, Miss Evans rolled up the drugget behind them. ‘Mr Evans doesn’t like to see it down,’ she explained when she caught Carrie’s eye. ‘I just put it there while he’s out to keep the carpet spick and span. It’s a new one, you see, lovely deep pile, and Mr Evans doesn’t want it trodden on.’
‘How are you supposed to get up the stairs, then?’ Nick said. ‘Walk on the ceiling, or fly like a bird?’
‘Well. Well, of course …’ Miss Evans laughed, rather breathlessly. ‘Of course you have to walk on it sometimes but not too often. Mr Evans said twice a day would be quite enough. You see, four of us going up and down twice a day, morning and evening, makes sixteen times altogether, and Mr Evans thinks that’s quite enough traipsing. So if you could try to remember to bring down all the things you’ll want for the day, in the morning …’
'But the bathroom's upstairs,' Nick said in an outraged voice.

'Her father always said that of course women could pick up a paintbrush and paint, but the fact was, they didn't make good artists. Olive had never quite worked out what the difference was. Since she was a little girl, playing in the corner of his gallery, she would hear Harold discussing the issue with his clients, both men and women – and often the women would agree with him, preferring to put their money behind young men rather than anyone of their own sex. The artist as naturally male was such a widely held presupposition that Olive had at times come to believe in it herself.'

‘You walk out of Europe with your British noses stuck in the air. “We’re special. We’re British. We don’t need Europe. We won all our wars alone. No Americans, no Russians, no anyone. We’re supermen.” The great freedom-loving President Donald Trump is going to save your economic arses, I hear. You know what Trump is?’ ‘Tell me.’ ‘He’s Putin’s shithouse cleaner. He does everything for little Vladi that little Vladi can’t do for himself: pisses on European unity, pisses on human rights, pisses on NATO.'

Some day the water will rust away the metal and the chains will snap, and the concrete's rigid heart will soften as even the most rigid hearts tend to do with the passing of the years. Only then will the two corpses, finally free, swim towards the chink of sky overhead, shimmering in the refracted sunlight; they will ascend towards that blissful blue, at first slowly, then fast and frantic, like pearl divers ascending for air.

But then something strange happened: the more he conjured up Rachel’s plump breasts, the more they looked to him like Sonya’s breasts. And even though Rachel’s breasts were more beautiful than Sonya’s—plump and sweet and very, very firm—the image of Sonya’s breasts made him so happy that he didn’t want to drive them away. So it happened that he described Rachel’s breast to the deputy commander of the Irgun while he was seeing Sonya’s breasts in his mind’s eye, until he was suddenly seized by the fear that he might get confused and begin describing Sonya’s breasts to his friend, not Rachel’s, and that was something he did not want to do.

'There's good coffee grown in Palestina, the climate is ideal, and it was Baron Rothschild's initiative that financed the first plantations back in the 1920s. It was the English Baron of that name, not the French one who invested his efforts futilely in Ottoman Palestine. This one, Lionel Rothschild, was a keen zoologist. The Rothschild Zoo in Ararat City, as well, of course, as the Rothschild Game Reserve, are named in his honour, as is our local species of giraffe, the five-horned Giraffa camelopardis rothschildi, or the Rothschild giraffe. He once rode a carriage pulled by six zebras to Buckingham Palace, both to prove their suitability for being tamed and to publicise the efforts of the settlers in the newly formed British Jude. He is buried near Lake Nakuru, close to his beloved giraffes.'

A few minutes after they hadn't answered the door, the little window over their heads had rattled and scraped and then somehow opened - and to their utter astonishment - a young man with no eyebrows had slithered through the crack. He'd stopped when he'd found himself face to face with the three frightened children looking up at him, and hung there, folded in the middle and with his legs still outside the house.
'Ahoy there' he'd saluted and they'd all giggled.
Within minutes of dropping hands-first into the front room Louis Bridge had bypassed the meter and got the lights back on. Then he'd left and come back with cheeseburgers.
While they had filled their bellies to drum skins, Smooth Louis had searched the house with a burgler's eye and found an envelope with three hundred pounds in it in the toe of a tennis shoe in their father's wardrobe, and a folder containing household bills and bank statements. He'd spent an hour running through what needed to be paid every month, and made a list for Jack.
'We've taken care of the electric,' he'd said, as if Jack had somehow been involved in that cleverness. 'You think you can handle the rest?'

'Diana's earliest memories were of exploring the maze of nine rooms upstairs and looking down at the carnival life of Bute Street from the sash windows. A parade of hulking great Vikings with blond beards and ripped shirts bloodied from brawls, of Salvation Army bands looking for drunks to save, of robed Yemenis and Somalis marching to celebrate Eid, of elaborate funeral cortèges for the last of the rich captains of Loudon Square, of Catholic children clad in white on Corpus Christi, led by a staff-twirling drum major, of makeshift calypso bands busking to raise enough money to tour the country, of street dice games descending into happy laughter or nasty threats, of bird like whores preening their feathers to catch a passing punter. What an education for a young girl it had been.'

The other silent creature is Winona. I keeping her stuck close to me. I don't trust anyone. What we walked through was the strike-out of her kindred. Scrubbed off with a metal brush like the dirt and dried blood on a soldier's jacket. Metal brush of strange and implacable hatred. Even the major. Same would be if soldiers fell on my family in Sligo and cut out our parts. When that old ancient Cromwell come to Ireland he said he would leave nothing alive. Said the Irish were vermin and devils. Clean out the country for good people to step into. Make a paradise. Now we make this America a paradise I guess. Guess it be strange so many Irish boys doing this work. Ain't that the way of the world. No such item as a virtuous people.

'Bolbol saw Hussein coming back, escorted by an agent waving his gun and gesturing to the rest of the family to get out of the van. Hussein stood next to Bolbol and whispered "They're going to arrest the body". Bolbol assumed there must have been some mistake, but no, when the agent led them to a tiled, windowless room, opened the door, and pushed them roughly inside, he understood that things were serious. It was true: they had placed the corpse under arrest. Their father had been wanted by more than one branch of the Mukhabarat for more than two years now.'

You came expecting a busy modern hospital – rural maybe, and small, but full of activity – in a town where things were happening. This was the capital of what used to be one of the homelands, so whatever the morality of the politics that gave rise to it, you expected a place full of administration and movement, people coming and going. And when you’d turned off the main route to the border and were coming in on the one minor road that led here, it might still look – when you saw the place from a distance – like what you’d expected. There was the main street, leading to the centre where the fountain and the statue stood, the shop-fronts and pavements and streetlights, and all the buildings beyond. It looked neat and calibrated and exact. Not a bad place to be.

And then you arrived and you saw. Maybe the first clue was a disturbing detail; a crack that ran through an otherwise pristine wall, or a set of broken windows in an office you passed. Or the fact that the fountain was dry and full of old sand at the bottom. And you slowed down, looking around you with vague anxiety, and suddenly it all came into clear focus. The weeds in the joints of the pavements and bricks, the grass growing at places in the street, the fused lamps and the empty shops behind their blank glass fronts and the mildew and damp and blistered paint and the marks of rain on every surface and the slow tumbling down of solid structures, sometimes grain by grain, sometimes in pieces. And you were not sure any more of where you were.

The cell door was a gate of bars. The guards looked in at me as they passed on their rounds, a tribute to my reputation. As part of my plans for greatness, I had bragged without shame about my skills in every wine store in the city. I had wanted everyone to know that I was the finest thief since mortal men were made, and I must have come close to accomplishing the goal. Huge crowds had gathered for my trial.

As she works, she wonders again why Dot didn’t tell her and Julius that she’d been ill. She was stubborn and proud, it was true. She’d taught them not to take anything from anyone, because as night turns to day, they – especially if it was the government – would come knocking and asking for it back, or more. Jeanie isn’t surprised that her mother hadn’t claimed her free prescription, neither is she too shocked that there’s so little money in the tin, but she still can’t help calculating expenses in her head: the funeral or cremation, a coffin, funeral directors, a hearse and flowers. What are you supposed to do if you can’t afford any of it – bury your mother in the garden?