Juggling the Stars Read Free Page B

developing this looking-down idea. He wasn’t concentrating. Morris wound the tape back a little and rolled over. He felt warm and comfortable on his stomach in green cotton pyjamas.
    â€˜I was ashamed of you. I …’
    Oh God.
    â€˜Mother understood. Mother …’
    No, keep off Mother. Anyway, she hadn’t understood. So damned religious. Mother, Morris appreciated this now, had only sided with him over studying because she somehow felt it was virtuous (probably because it seemed to involve mortification of the flesh) and hence associated with religion, which was the weapon she opposed to Dad’s drinking. When you got down to it, both of them had tussled over his future the same way they’d argue what colour to paint the walls in the loo. Or whether to have sex or not.
    â€˜Anyway the point is there’s been a change of heart. I’m going to look up, look sharp. Italy’s a funny place and it’s taught me a lot of things. But most of all it’s brought me round to your form of socialism, though not in the way you understand it. The rich deserve everything we can hit them with and I’m going to start hitting just as soon as I can.’
    No, that was awfully shrill. That wasn’t right at all. It didn’t say why he had stolen the document case, or started this strange courtship with Massimina. After all, he really rather admired the taste of the Italian upper classes. It was joining them, not beating them was the problem, living artistically as they lived, with style, with flair. Whereas Dad hated the rich because he didn’t want to be like them. He hadn’t explained himself at all.
    Start again then.
    â€˜You do realize that I admire you Dad. I admire you and hate you. And here’s another interesting contradiction, if you will. My desire to humiliate is curiously mixed up with a desire to be
in the right
. I see that quite …’
    But the whole thing had lost all sense of direction now. He’d noticed the same problem whenever he’d tried to write a letter to the newspapers. You began with a very clear idea - the change of heart, the looking up - and then halfway through you realized it wasn’t clear at all. It was a mess in fact.
    The dog started barking at two. Morris woke to a howl, long and bloodcurdling as a werewolf's. Then came repeated barks only a yard or two from his window. His jaws, as always when he woke, were clamped together tight, his tongue sore down one side and swollen. He lay listening to the dog, brain pounding with the most profound black anger, anger that seemed to bulge out from between his tired eyes. It wasn’t enough to have your mother die on you then, the only person who’d cared for you, who’d encouraged you. It wasn’t enough to have been born poor, to have a peasant of a beer swilling, stinking, pork-scraping father, to have fought upstream every moment of your life, to have been kicked out of university and rejected for more jobs than appeared in the
Guardian
in a month - no, to add to it all you had to have a dog next door shatter your sleep in the middle of every night, so that you could lie there rigid and horribly awake, going over and over everything again, the sense of frustration, of failure, of being taken for a ride, of having made the wrong decisions, been ignored, of having nothing, but nothing to look forward to, ever, nothing to show for all that effort.
    The dog’s tireless barking rang between courtyard walls and seemed to hack at his tired brain like a pick sinking into mud. Lying on his back, Morris began to cry, miserable tears of self pity. His cheeks ran. He was damned, merely. Damned. Nothing less. What gave it away was that nobody else seemed to worry about the animal. They were immune. The barking didn’t wake
them
. But he was cursed with some terrible disease that brought these troubles to him. And he didn’t deserve it. He really didn’t deserve