Charades Read Online Free Page B

if Cook had been less erratic, if he hadn’t wandered round the Pacific and bumped into the east coast of Australia, this was in 1770, he wouldn’t have landed at Botany Bay and planted the flag and claimed the entire east coast of the land mass for King George III. And if it wasn’t for that I wouldn’t be here on an Australian passport working for cash in Central Square so that I can hang around and sit in on your course. Curious, isn’t it? Shit wages, I might add, but illegal, so I can’t complain. In that dive off Albany Street, d’you know it?
    â€œFunny,” she says, watching him watching her. “This reminds me of something in Cook’s journal. He got himself trapped inside the reef, you know, the Great Barrier Reef, and strafed the underside of the Endeavour so badly that he had to decamp on the north Queensland beaches. Where of course the crew saw Aborigines.
    â€œQuite naked. Cook wrote in his journal. Which would have made the point, don’t you think?
    â€œ Without any manner of clothing whatever, he added, just a little fascinated, I’d say.
    â€œEven the women do not so much as cover their privates, he wrote. Hmm. They never brought any of their women along with them to the ship , the old perv went on to complain, but always left them on the opposite side of the river where we had frequent opportunities of viewing them through our glasses.”
    She shakes her head. “What a bunch of voyeurs!
    â€œI can’t think,” she says archly, “what brought that to my mind. Should I cover my privates?”
    â€œI’d much prefer not.” He reaches for her as she moves, with mock threat, to where her clothes are. There is a kind of languid skirmish, arms and legs brushing each other like ribbons, and then she has slithered away from him again, and he is in the armchair, she on the bed.
    â€œAnyway” — she is plumping up the pillows behind her — “from my point of view, of course, it was just as well that Cook was both erratic and possessive, since you people were getting so worked up about flags yourselves. At the same time too. I mean, if the citizens of Boston hadn’t done what they did while Cook was on his third and final voyage, hotfooting it to Hawaii to be murdered, then my mother Bea’s great-great-great grandmother, a hardworking thief from Bristol, would presumably have been sent to some plantation in Virginia instead of to Botany Bay.
    â€œAnd where would that have left me?
    â€œWhich says a lot for erratic, in my opinion.
    â€œQuite aside from explorers, though, there’s all that evidence you keep giving in your lectures: those muon tracks that curl like ferns, and the wandering quark, and all that stupendous power, explosive power, nuclear I mean, from the erratic behaviour of microphenomena … There’s a lot to be said for it, isn’t there?”
    She sighs. “But academic supervisors, they like straight lines. You keep wasting time, they said to me. Whose time? I asked. Because I am ravenous about their courses, I can’t sleep at night for wanting to get through the extra reading list. So where am I wasting time?
    â€œBut Professor Bickerton — I had him for history — now, there was an absorbing course, American Presidential Politics, though it is sometimes the seemingly trivial and idiosyncratic detail that rivets my attention. The Pepys’ eye view, as it were. Like this, for example: Eisenhower is making a speech on foreign policy to a packed lecture hall full of students. I can’t remember where, somewhere in the midwest for sure. There’s a lot of applause and a few whistles and question period begins. First question: a girl in a green sweater comes to the microphone. ‘Mr President,’ she asks earnestly. ‘Could you tell us why your wife wears bangs?’
    â€œMicrophenomena again, you see. Why is it,