Carry Me Down Read Online Free Page B

looks like a crooked gash that opens and closes.
    ‘John, it’s time for tea,’ says my mother.
    I put my half-eaten banana under my pillow. I don’t like to eat bananas in front of people.
    ‘You can bring your banana with you if you’d like.’
    My mother refers to my banana as though it were a pet.
    ‘That’s OK,’ I say. ‘I’ll eat it later.’
    ‘Suit yourself,’ she says.
    We sit at the kitchen table and eat cream of chicken soup. Granny’s handbag is on the kitchen floor by the door and her coat is on the back of her chair. When she comes back from Dublin, she usually asks me to take her coat and bag to her room and she usually gives me a sweet when I come back with her slippers. Something is different today.
    She drops her shoes to the floor and the smell of nylon and sweat climbs up the table and into my chicken soup. I watch her while she eats and her eating habits make me feel sick. My father is nearly as bad. Compared to my mother they are like wild dogs and the sounds they make fill the kitchen, like urinating fills a bathroom, and I want to block my ears. Their spoons clank against their bowls, their tongues slop in their mouths, and it is impossible to think of anything else.
    When we have finished our soup, my grandmother goes to the dresser and comes back with six cream buns and a piece of wedding cake. The cake is covered in marzipan icing and smells awful, like fresh paint. I put two buns onto a plate and stand up from the table. I want to eat in my room. But my father puts his leg out in front of me so that I can’t leave.
    ‘Where do you think you’re going?’ he says, with anger that is too sudden, too ready; as though he has been saving it up from Sunday.
    A pain, not quite sharp, but not dull either, darts up from my bladder and rushes to my throat. ‘Nowhere,’ I say, and sit back down.
    ‘Well, then,’ says my father to my grandmother, ‘did you have a good time in Dublin?’
    My grandmother’s lipstick has smeared onto a bun and she has cream on her nose. Her mouth is full of sodden bread, jam and cream, but she doesn’t bother to swallow the wet mess before she speaks.
    ‘It was great. After the races I went to Evelyn’s shop and I sat myself down by her fire for a while.’
    Evelyn is my mother’s older sister.
    My father and grandmother talk for a while, and my mother and I watch them, waiting for something to happen. There is often a row when my father and grandmother are at the table together.
    After drinking tea, my grandmother has a glass of sherry, and her shoulders drop under the pleasure of it. Her head lolls, her eyes close and, finally, her head falls forward. My father moves his chair, and the scraping wakes her. She looks at him, startled.
    ‘What happened to your beard?’ she asks, as though waking from a dream.
    My mother and I laugh.
    ‘I want to know what happened to my son’s face,’ she says. ‘He’s gone all soft and naked.’
    She has hardly finished speaking when her eyes close and her head folds into her chest.
    ‘Wake up!’ my father shouts. ‘The table is not a bed.’
    She opens her eyes. ‘It’s my house and I’ll sleep in the cupboard under the stairs if I want to.’
    I wonder where Crito is and start calling for her. ‘Puss, puss, puss. Heeeeeere Crito! Heeeeeere Crito!’
    My father frowns at me, gets up, and leaves the kitchen without speaking.
    Whenever my grandmother wins more than fifty pounds at the races, she takes me to Butlins holiday camp or to a circus if there’s one near by. At Butlins last year there was an exhibition called Amazing Wonders of the World .
    There were pictures of giants and midgets, of a man with no arms who played the piano with his feet, and of Siamese twins, who faced away from each other while they kissed their boyfriends.
    My grandmother and I sat in the front row and watched a film of a man going over Niagara Falls in a barrel and a re-enactment of Harry Houdini escaping from a straitjacket