The Whole Story and Other Stories Read Free

told him again. I need as many as possible, she said.
    Okay, he’d said.
    He worked for her because she paid well; she had a grant.
    Have you ever read it? she asked.
    No, he’d said. Do I have to?
    So we beat on, she’d said. Boats against the current. Borne back ceaselessly into the past. Get it?
    What about petrol money, if I’m supposed to drive all over the place looking for books? he’d said.
    You’ve got five hundred quid to buy five hundred books. You get them for less, you can keep the change. And I’ll pay you two hundred on top for your trouble. Boats against the current. It’s perfect, isn’t it?
    And petrol money? he’d said.
    I’ll pay it, she’d sighed.
    Because:
    There was once a woman in the bath who had just phoned her brother and asked him to find her as many copies of The Great Gatsby as possible. She shook the drips off the phone, dropped it over the side on to the bathroom carpet and put her arm back into the water quick because it was cold.
    She was collecting the books because she made full-sized boats out of things boats aren’t usually made out of. Three years ago she had made a three-foot long boat out of daffodils which she and her brother had stolen at night from people’s front gardens all over town. She had launched it, climbing into it, in the local canal. Water had come up round her feet almost immediately, then up round her knees, her thighs, till she was midriff-deep in icy water and daffodils floating all round her, unravelled.
    But a small crowd had gathered to watch it sink and the story had attracted a lot of local and even some national media attention. Sponsored by Interflora, which paid enough for her to come off unemployment benefit, she made another boat, five feet long and out of mixed flowers, everything from lilies to snowdrops. It also sank, but this time was filmed for an arts project, with her in it, sinking. This had won her a huge arts commission to make more unexpected boats. Over the last two years she had made ten-and twelve-footers out of sweets, leaves, clocks and photographs and had launched each one with great ceremony at a different UK port. None of them had lasted more than eighty feet out to sea.
    The Great Gatsby, she thought in the bath. It was a book she remembered from her adolescence and as she’d been lying in the water fretting about what to do next so her grant wouldn’t be taken away from her it had suddenly come into her head.
    It was perfect, she thought, nodding to herself. So we beat on. The last line of the book. She ducked her shoulders under the water to keep them warm.
    And so, since we’ve come to the end already:
    The seven-foot boat made of copies of The Great Gatsby stuck together with waterproof sealant was launched in the spring in the port of Felixstowe.
    The artist’s brother collected over three hundred copies of The Great Gatsby and drove between Wales and Scotland doing so. It is still quite hard to buy a copy of The Great Gatsby second-hand in some of the places he visited. It cost him a hundred and eighty three pounds fifty exactly. He kept the change. He was also a man apt to wash his hands before he ate, so was unharmed by any residue left by the fly earlier in the story on the cover of the copy he bought in the quiet second-hand bookshop.
    This particular copy of The Great Gatsby, with the names of some of the people who had owned it inked under each other in their different handwritings on its inside first page – Rosemary Child, Sharon Patten, David Connor, Rita Jackson – was glued into the prow of the boat, which stayed afloat for three hundred yards before it finally took in water and sank.
    The fly which had paused on the book that day spent that evening resting on the light fitting and hovering more than five feet above ground level. This is what flies tend to do in the evenings. This fly was no exception.
    The woman who ran the second-hand bookshop had been delighted to sell all her copies of The Great