Juggling the Stars Read Free Page A

a foreign language near perfectly and the curious freedom that ability now appeared to give him in the way he thought. As if he had shifted off rails. His mind seemed to roam free now over any and every possibility. He must make a big effort always to think in Italian as well as speak it, Morris thought. It could be a way out of himself and out of the trap they had all and always wanted him to fall into.
    Twisting the wax out of his ear with a Q tip, Morris considered himself in the mirror. Yes, perhaps it was precisely the change of language that had slowly been altering his way of thinking. (Had he been thinking in Italian when he stole the document case?) His blue eyes glared at themselves in a mirror that was misting. ‘Dr-r-rarudge!' he said, but with a smile about the corner of his lips now, a slight baring of long teeth. It seemed a new smile to Morris. He really couldn’t remember having seen that particular smile there before. So much inside oneself one didn’t know about.
‘Cara Massimina,’
he mouthed, ‘cara, cara, Massimina, ' and he felt rather pleased with himself.
    â€˜Dear Dad, you remember you always used to go on at me about having my eyes on the ground? You used to put a fist in my back, cup your hand under my chin and force me upright. You said studying would turn me into a worm.’
    Morris paused, clicking off the dictaphone and using it to scratch an itch behind his ear. What was he trying to get at?
    â€˜You said I looked like a spina bifida case the way I was always bent over reading. I said you were hardly bloody Adonis yourself. You didn’t know who Adonis was but you belted me for swearing all the same. As if you never did.’
    This was tedious: infant-trauma-equals-adult-misbehaviour stuff. Never been convinced of that. And yet at the same time he did feel vaguely excited. Explaining yourself was always exciting. Especially when there was some new evidence to hand.
    That new smile, this new idea.
    â€˜And then when I was about fifteen and did start taking care of myself and using aftershave (like Gregorio!) and combing and trying to walk with my chest out and bum held in, you said I was a pansy. (Why was that particular word so wounding?) So that I couldn’t win either way.’
    In the end, of course it was quite simply a question of identity. Morris the good boy, the greaser, mother’s helper, the bumsucker, the social climber, the masterly filler-in-of-forms, struggling from terraced Acton and dumb unionized dad to Cambridge lawns - champers and prawns - or Morris the rejected, the despised, the hard-done-by, miss is as good as a mile, irretrievably alienated (at least the ILEA had given you the words), determined to take revenge.
    â€˜Revenge, Dad. Because …’
    One was both of course, both Morrises, and yet the two personalities were not easy to combine.
    I … because you were right about having my eyes on the ground. At least metaphorically. (I think I stand up a great deal straighter than you, actually.) I’d swallowed the English society.is-a-meritocracy line. I was studying to get out, to get up. To get out of our crappy mediocre house, our ugly street. Away from your beer-drinking, farting, darts friends. And instead if I'd looked around I'd’ve seen I could study till doomsday and never lift my head an inch out of the shit.’
    Morris stared. The sheets he lay in were so gritty they were almost sandpaper, and yet the idea of washing them seemed quite insurmountably tiring and tiresome. What he really needed in the end of course was a maid. Or a wife? He smiled wryly and wondered if it was that new smile he had come out with in the bathroom. Or even a mother.
    'You remember when Mother died you said I should go right out and work and not fart about studying pansy things like …’
    No, that was wrong. That was the wrong tone altogether. And he’d let himself be driven off course. He was supposed to be