Umbrella Read Free Page B

notebook he has taken out and flipped open: What will she smash into? What will happen then? All the subhuman parts of her – can they be observed? in the long dark corridor where they play all sorts: skippin’ and boats and hoopla-for-chokkolits . Mary Jane comes to smackem , Lookit the skirtin’! she cries. In the passage it’s allus dark – so dark inna coalhole . Illumination comes only from a fanlight above the door, comes on sunny days in a single oblique beam a Jacob’s ladder that picks out a burnin’ bush on the floorboards that Stan and Audrey jump into and out of – Yer put yer leff hand in, yer put yer leff arm out, Shake it a little, a little, then turn yersel about, the little ones, they are, going Loobeloo, loobeloo , but Bert just laughs at them: You’re rag-arses, you aynt got no proper cloves, juss smocks, and he swings open the front door and goes out on the step to play with his marbles . . . his wunner . . . his fiver an’ sixer inall . He has them all neatly wrapped up in one of their father’s noserags, wrapped up and tied in a little bindle. He sits on the front step and gets them out and places them in a row. Audrey peeks from behind the door and sees claybrown, marblewhirl , glasstripe with sunrays shining through it so pretty she cannot resist it when he goes down the four steps to sit at the kerb and twist fallen straw – but grabs it and darts back inside. Stan’s eyes are wide, Yul catchit, he says, yul catchit. They stand in the burnin’ bush looking at the striped marble glowing in Audrey’s palm and neither of them can move – Yer put yer leff leg in, yer put yer leff leg out, yer put yer leff leg out, yer put yer leff leg out . . . but it won’t go no ferver , it is stuck there kicking and kicking against an invisible barrier, while, terrorised by the imagining of what Bert will do to me , Audrey’s head shakes, Yer put yer noddle in, yer put yer noddle out . . . The door crashes back on its hinges and there he is: Where’s me stripey! He howls, then charges for her, Yer put yer whole self in, yer put yer whole self out . . . He grabs her wrist so hard she feels the bones grating together inside it, then twists it so that the fist opens helplessly. A’wah-wa-wa! A’wah-wa-wa! she blubs. Audrey’s big brother’s starting eyes are fixed on his beloved marble – but hers, hers, are equally held by the peculiar bracelet he wears, its golden segments fiery in the burnin’ bush , and on the back of it a huge black jewel Mother’s jet beads . Audrey staggers, almost falls, bends double to escape the hurt and is caught there feeling the long Vulcanised strip of tension that loops round her middle and stretches in either direction the length of the passage an inner tube pulled tight round the rim of a bicycle wheel .
    Stuck in the present’s flesh are the looking-glass fragments of a devastating explosion: a time bomb was primed in the future and planted in the past. The debris includes the row of houses along Novello Street towards Eel Brook Common, their top two storeys weatherboarded and bowing over the roadway under widows’ peaks of rumpled tiling. There’s the fat-bellied kiln of the pottery in the crook of the King’s Road and the ragged patterning of the yews in the misty grounds of Carnwath House. Old Father Thames sucking on weedy-greasy piles stuck in the mud all along the riverside from the bridge to the station. Her own father sucking on a hazel twig he’s cut and whittled with his pocket knife to slide in and out of his muddy mouth, in between his remaining weedy-greasy teeth. — Audrey’s father, Sam Death: not De’Ath, not lar-de-dar, not like some uz thinks they’re better than they should be. Namely, Sam’s brother Henry, who styles himself like that and resides in a new villa somewhere called Muswell Hill. They have their own general, the De’Aths. Audrey has heard this said so many times that even now, a big girl of ten, she cannot forestall this