I Cannot Get You Close Enough Read Free

hate the world.”
    â€œShe didn’t go cold.” I inhaled and added my stream of smoke to Amalie’s. They mingled in midair, a microcosm, the birth of clouds. “Sheila was born cold, came out cold from the womb. Well, she’s done all the damage she’s going to do to my family. It’s going to stop.”
    â€œWould you care for sherry then? I’ve got a bottle of amontilado my brother picked up. I’ve been saving it. No good to drink alone.”
    â€œSure,” I said. “I’d love it. That would be fine.” So we opened the sherry and poured it into small red glasses and began to talk. Then we went next door to Sheila’s flat to look around. There was not much there. It was musty, depressing, bare. It was impossible to imagine Sheila in such a place. “She went off a fortnight ago,” Amalie explained. “Had a party one night and the next day they all left. I’ve cleaned it up since then. She hires a cleaning lady when she’s here but she won’t trust her with a key.”
    â€œI can’t imagine why not. There’s nothing here.”
    â€œThere were more things a while back. They were taken off. She’s not here as often as she was, back last summer.”
    I got up and walked around the rooms again. Whatever else this flat meant, it meant Sheila was broke. If she was broke, that explained why she needed Jessie. If she had Jessie, her father would have to give her money. He would never let Jessie live like this. Suddenly I wanted to be outside. I wanted to protect Sheila from this flat. If Sheila lived in a place like this, then we might all be in danger. Danger? How had I come to perceive the world as full of danger? The world is full of beauty and possibility and crazy dazzling people. I stopped at the back door and turned to Amalie. “Let’s sit in the garden and finish the sherry,” I said. “I never get to talk to real Londoners. I always end up talking to reporters.”
    â€œWell, we can’t drink it all,” she said. “We’d be in hospital if we drank the bottle.”
    So I spent the afternoon in a walled garden drinking sherry with Amalie Archer, who had been in the Royal British Air Force during the war and received medals from the Queen. The medals were duly produced and duly marveled over, along with pictures of her dead husband, who was killed in North Africa in the same war, and snapshots of her last trip to Bath. She had friends, Amalie assured me, and a brother in Oxford who came down for holidays. “Have to have your friends,” she concluded. “Take your sister-in-law. She stays alone for weeks sometimes. Barely leaves her door.”
    â€œWhat does she do inside?”
    â€œI wouldn’t know, love. Sends out for groceries or the papers. Then suddenly will leave like this and not come back for a fortnight.”
    â€œDoes she have another house somewhere? In the country perhaps.”
    â€œNot that I know of. There, there’s a jack — that redbird has been in this garden for twenty years. Him or his progeny. See that post, that’s his post. Never fails to cheer me up to see him take his seat.”
    â€œDo you put out seed for him, for the birds around here?”
    â€œSometimes I do. She didn’t like them being here. Said they stained the yard with their droppings. So I quit since she asked me to. They can come and get it at my place. Still, he likes to sit there.”
    â€œThat’s our Sheila. She always has hated animals. She hates fish. Imagine hating fish.”
    Amalie shook her head. “I wouldn’t be worrying about a court giving a little girl to her. You can’t get her to look you in the eye. If you look at her she looks away.”
    â€œShe can be charming when she wants something. I’ve seen her get her way from people you thought would never fall for her, and yet they do. When she wants somebody she goes