Death of a River Guide Read Free Page A

was undeniably family, who could cure warts just by looking at them and who bit the tops off whiskey bottles before downing their contents in a few gulps, also saw things, although he saw them not only at the end of a bottle but also in the shape of warts. He saw all sorts of things, both bad and good, and around the Forth district in which he lived, his reading of local warts and carbuncles was treated with some seriousness. On Mama’s side, her mother had the third eye and read fortunes in the dregs of turkish coffee and by this method foretold that worms would crawl out of Mama’s stomach, which was more or less what happened. Of my fate my staramama was much vaguer: she only saw a bird wheeling in the sky.
    So let me say that I am not surprised by this vision thing. But I am not sure if any of it adds up to much. I mean, what use to me is a vision of a bloody bird? Does that help me to work out whether I am fated to live or not and, therefore, whether I ought be struggling to survive or not? No, I can tell you it doesn’t. A vision should give you some answers, shouldn’t it? But all I see are more questions. It’s not right, I tell you, it’s crook and it’s wrong. But I am not surprised by that either. Life has only ever been a constant puzzlement to me, so why should I expect death to suddenly make a whole lot of sense?
    Let me also say that I am not even surprised to be here drowning. I knew it could only end badly when Pig’s Breath first rang and offered me the job. Even the Cockroach knew it would end badly. Why did I take the job anyway? Madonna santa , as Maria Magdalena Svevo was inclined to say in moments of ill temper. Madonna santa . The hard ones upfront. How can I answer that? Things have never really gone right for me. As they say, it’s all written in the book above so why should I give a bugger why I took the job that led to this when I can blame anything? I was gone for a long time before this little number came up. Let me tell you. I mean, where do I begin? The family? The church whose walls wept blood? The school that taught people to run backwards? My father who used to hold big barbeques for ghosts and people who had never even been? The baby and all that bad bloody business? The bedspread with the tear stain that wouldn’t wash out? Couta Ho’s crazy code flags? That bastard Pig’s Breath? That idiot Gaia Head? I get a bad feeling in my guts just thinking about it all normally, but at the moment there are so many other pains crowding around my body I just don’t care. Nothing ever really seemed that important to me, not since Jemma’s death. People worry about how their hair looks, or what other people think of the colour they’ve painted their house, or, as I was once asked by a woman, what size doily to put on her washing machine. But you will understand me when I say that if you are drowning none of these things seems overly important. And I am drowning. I don’t care whether your hair is done or not done, whether your house is painted or not, or whether you even have a house or a washing machine to place a doily upon. Granted I ought to. I’ll give you that, but then I’ve always been easygoing. Lazy, some might say, but I wouldn’t agree. Or maybe I would. All that they say about me being lazy, about being a drifter, about having no future, about not knowing what I want out of life, maybe it is all true.
    Maybe I was always drowning.
    The only difference now is that I no longer have to put up with all those bastards crowding me, making me want to leave, to run, to piss off out of there as the saying goes. I could even get used to where I am now, enveloped in rushing white water, if it didn’t plain hurt so much. Where do I begin? Maybe with what I am seeing at this moment. Because it makes me feel funny, what I am seeing. Because I have never seen such things, least not in the way I am seeing them now. It’s