Seeing Stars Read Free Page B

lips, which have never received the
    attention they deserve.” The poison had reached as far as
    her windpipe and was tightening around her throat. Dean
    said, “Do you think we could have made it together?” “I
    think so,” she whispered. “I don’t like courgettes,” Dean
    joked, and those were his last words. “I would have done
    broccoli instead,” she breathed, “or even cauliflower.
    Whatever you asked for I would have made.”
    There was a horrible pause as we sat there wondering
    whether or not to applaud, then the curtains closed.
My Difference
    I’ve been writing a lot of poems recently about my
    difference but my tutor isn’t impressed. He hasn’t said as
    much, yet it’s clear that as far as he’s concerned my
    difference doesn’t
cut much ice.
He wants me to dress my
    difference with tinsel and bells and flashing lights, or sit it
    on a float and drive it through town at the head of the May
    Day Parade. “Tell me one interesting fact about your
    difference,” he says, so I tell him about the time I lost my
    difference down the plughole in a Bournemouth guesthouse
    and had to fish it back with a paperclip on a length of
    dental floss. He says, “Er, that’s not really what I had in
    mind, Henry.” Basically he needs my difference to die in a
    crash, or be ritually amputated in a civil war. Then he
    shows me a prize-winning poem (one of his own in fact)
    about a set of twins whose differences were swapped at
    birth by a childless midwife, and who grew up with the
    wrong differences, one in the bosom of the Saudi Royal
    Family and the other beneath the “jackboot of poverty,” and
    who met in later life only to discover that their differences
    were exactly the same. He wants me to lock my difference
    in a coal cellar until it comes of age then take it outside and
    reverse over with the ride-on mower, thus making my
    difference
very different indeed,
or auction my difference in
    the global marketplace, or film it getting a “happy slapping”
    in a busy street, or scream the details of my difference into
    the rabbit hole of the cosmos hoping to bend the ear of
    creation itself. I tell him I once swallowed my difference
    without water on an empty stomach, but he isn’t listening
    any more. He’s quoting some chap who went at his
    difference with a pair of pinking shears. He’s talking about
    such and such a poet who threw his difference in front of
    the royal train, or had it beaten from him by plain-clothed
    officers and rendered down into potting compost or
    wallpaper paste, or set fire to his difference on primetime
    national TV. And when I plead with him that no matter
    how small and pitiful my difference might seem to him, to
    me it makes all the difference in the world, he looks at me
    with an expression of complete and undisguised and
    irreversible indifference.
The Accident
    Leo burnt his hand very badly on a jet of steam
    which hissed from his toasted pitta bread as he
    opened it up with a knife. The visiting nurse said,
    “Are you sure you haven’t been beating up your
    wife?” “Excuse me?” said Leo. “Are you sure you
    didn’t sustain this injury during the course of
    physically assaulting your wife?” questioned the
    nurse. Leo was shocked. “It’s a burn,” he said.
    “Of course it’s a burn, but who’s to say she
    wasn’t defending herself with a steam iron or a
    frying pan? Do you cook your own meals, sir, or
    do you insist on your wife doing the housework?”
    Leo was flabbergasted. “I’m not even married,”
    he said. “Yeah, right, and I’m the Angel of the
    North,” she said, throwing him a roll of lint as she
    barged out of the house and slammed the door
    behind her.
    Leo really wasn’t married. His friends were
    married. Both of them. One was even divorced.
    But Leo was a bachelor and not at all happy with
    the situation. Bachelor—the word tasted like
    diesel in his mouth. However, that night in the
    pub he met Jacqueline, a young blind