Burial Read Free Page A

that she thought her breastbone was going to crack. A chair-back wedged itself against her shoulder. She cried out ‘
Help! Somebody help me
!!’, but Freddie Benson was playing his own guitar in accompaniment to his CD player now, and all she could hear was the deep bass thrumming of Bruce Springsteen.
    She couldn’t breathe. She felt one rib being pushed in further and further; and then something inside her chest made a sickening noise, halfway between a crackle and a wet sigh. She felt an intensely sharp pain, a pain that made her scream; and when she screamed she screamed out a fine spray of blood.
    She felt the furniture bearing down on her harder and harder. She felt as if gravity were pressing her against the wall.
    She shouted ‘
Help
!’ again and again; but she thought about all of those times when she had heard other women shouting in the Village — muffled cries of pain and despair — and how she had always ignored them. Other women’s agony hadn’t been
her
business.
    She smelled that deep, sour smell, like a fetid well being opened up. She twisted her head around and saw to her horror that the hunched-up shadow was heaving itself silently towards her, huge-headed, beastly, a living nightmare fashioned out of nothing but darkness.

One
    I could never understand why I always attracted old ladies so much. Old ladies have gushed all over me ever since I was knee high to a high knee. They kissed me, they cooed at me, they patted me so often I was lucky my head didn’t end up totally flat on top. They gave me dimes for candy, which I saved up and bet with at the track.
    By the time I was nine I suppose it had become second nature to think that old ladies = money, just like e = mc 2 . I ran errands for them, mowed their lawns, painted their fences, all of that Tom Sawyer stuff. In return (apart from paying me) they taught me how to play the stock-market, how to cheat at bridge, and how to blackmail major food companies into sending you heaps of free groceries, all of that old lady stuff. Don’t you ever think that old ladies are innocent old dears: they have all day to sit and think of ways to rip off the system, and they do.
    It was an old lady called Adelaide Bright who taught me the most profitable skill of all, however: and that was how to tell fortunes. Tea-leaves, crystal balls, star signs, tarot cards … she knew them all and she showed me how they were done.
    The first thing she taught me was that tea-leaves and crystal balls and astrological signs are only a ritual, a little bit of hocus-pocus to impress your client. She was one of the best: but she demonstrated without a doubt that you can no more predict somebody’s future from the star-sign they were born under than you can predict when a tire is going to blow out from the time of day it was moulded.
    Telling the future isn’t magic, it’s common sense. All you have to do is take a long shrewd look at your customer, come to some logical conclusions, and lie a lot. Oh — and
charge
a lot, too. The more expensive the fortune-telling, the readier your customers will be to believe you. After all, they’re going to waste 100 bucks on nonsense?
    Adelaide taught me how to sum people up by the way they sat, the way they talked, their nervous habits, the way they laughed. Most of all, she taught me how to read people’s personalities by the way they dressed. Two women can be wearing the same outfit, but one of them can be wearing it because it’s the very best that she can afford, while another woman can be wearing it because — to her — it’s cheap and casual.
    â€˜Look at their shoes,’ Adelaide used to remind me. ‘You can read volumes from people’s shoes. Are they new but dirty? Are they old but well-repaired? Are they Nike trainers or are they wingtip Oxfords?’
    The only thing about which Adelaide was seriously superstitious was the tarot. She thought