Transcendent Read Free Page A

sweating, and regretting my decision to walk. There was an unpleasant smell in the air, too, a stink of salty decay, as if some immense sea animal was rotting on the beach. But it couldn’t be that, of course; there were no animals in the sea.
    At last I bore down on my mother’s house, my childhood home. It was one of the few of the old stock still standing. But it was surrounded by heaps of sandbags, all slowly decaying. Big electric screens shimmered around the yard, designed to keep the mosquitoes at bay, and on the roof a wagon-wheel home turbine languidly turned, barely stirred by the breeze.
    And here came my big brother, around the corner of the house, large as life, paintbrush in hand. “Michael! So you showed your face.” Instant criticism, but what could you expect? John wiped his palm ostentatiously on his coveralls, leaving a silvery streak, and held his big hand out to shake mine.
    I shook back, cautiously. John was a big man, built like a football player. He always towered over me. A couple of years older than me, he’s balding, and his brown eyes are hard, set in a broad face. My features come from my mother’s side, but where she was always tall, pretty, with gray eyes like smoke, I’m small, round-shouldered, dark. Intense, people sometimes say. I’m more like my uncle George, in fact. My mother always said I reminded her of England. I got her gray eyes, though, which looked good in the fleeting years when I was almost handsome.
    John takes after our father. As always, he intimidated me.
    “I flew in,” I said lamely. “Quite a journey these days.”
    “Isn’t it just? Kind of hot, too. Not good weather to work in.” He clapped me on the back, spreading more Paint and sweat over my shirt, thus messing up my laundry
and
my conscience. He led me around to the back of the house. “Mom’s indoors. Making lemonade, I think. Though it’s sometimes hard to tell exactly what she’s doing,” he said with conspiratorial gloom. “Say hello to the kids. Sven? Claudia?”
    They came running from around the side of the house. They’d been playing soccer in the yard; their ball rolled plaintively along the ground, chiming softly for attention. They faced me and smiled, their eyes blank. “Uncle Michael, hi.” “Hello.”
    Sven and Claudia, in their early teens, were tall, handsome, well-fed kids with matching shocks of blond hair. They were the products of John’s second marriage, to a German called Inge, now vanished after a divorce; they had their mother’s coloring, though both had something of their father’s heavyset massiveness. I always thought they looked like Cro-Magnon hunters.
    For a couple of minutes I tried to make small talk with the kids about soccer. It turned out Claudia was the keenest, and even had a trial lined up for her local pro club. But as usual the talk was strained, polite, a formality, as if I were a school inspector.
    We were all wary. I’d committed a faux pas a couple of Christmases back when I’d sent them packages addressed to Sven and Claudia
Poole.
After the divorce my mother had taken to using her maiden name, as had I. But when he left home John switched back to my father’s name, Bazalget—I’d never known why, some row with my mother—and so these two were officially Bazalgets. John had a way of blowing up at me about such things at family occasions, spoiling the day and upsetting everybody.
    I’d learned to tread carefully. We are an unusual family. Then again, maybe not.
    I remembered how, when uncle George had come visiting, I would go running to him. But then George always brought us gifts. Smart man. Of course it wasn’t my insensitivity as an uncle that made these kids so bland. They were Happy kids, and this was the way Happy kids turned out. I’d never even dared challenge John about his choices over
that.
    John waggled his paintbrush. “I ought to get on. And you ought to go see Mom,” he said, as if I’d been putting it off.
    So I walked