Chop Chop Read Online Free

her mouth in reference to your humble narrator. Aggressive in her cleaning too. Forever spraying that funereal air freshener. Squirting it through the keyhole of my room while I dozed, as if I were some monstrous bug. Gregor Samsa choking on the stench of roses.
    It was not much of a setup, yet I had become sort of attached to this grimy Regency town house, its rubbish-strewn grilles out front protecting a rubbish-strewn basement, its scuffed gray door declaring NO JUNK MAIL OR FLYERS, the sooty shadows above. My bolt-hole lodgings, partitioned along one side to accommodate a minute communal bathroom, bore the pleasant wear and tear of previous tenants. Scuffs, burns, a bad stain on the carpet where someone might have sacrificed a goat. Perfect for the downtrodden creative.
Freckled mirror, chipped sink—all mod cons. Well-appointed view of strip between church and betting shop. Fragrant landlady seeks discreet and respectful professionals. No junk males or fly-by-nights.
    Before The Swan, I would sit in an ancient armchair that smelled of hand lotion and read novels from the charity shop downstairs. Or I would watch, through the peeling sash window, the sleepless criminal bustle at the shabbier end of Camden Road. The chewed-up faces and hands cupped for change, the weathered ski jackets with bulging pockets, the stiff, brisk, kneeless walk.
Use so-and-so’s mobile, tell him I want three, two white, tell him yourself, I’ve got no credit, hurry up
. The waiting, the fading into the background until they were no longer there, only to reemerge implausibly in a later act, like the crew of a Shakespearean shipwreck.
    So often was I peering out of that window, observing the tireless tide of barter and exchange, I had begun to name these lurking, fading characters. There was Rosemary Baby, a tiny woman with the face of a very young girl and a hoarse, emaciated voice that rose, singsong, over the hubbub of the street. She had parted me from five valuable pounds on my first day—a labyrinthine sob story about catching a bus to hospital and a stolen handbag,
please mister serious mister honest to god mister
—and cackled now whenever she saw me. That well-dressed gentleman strolling leisurely through the crowds, hands behind his back, I knew as This Charming Man: the embodiment of good manners when he asked you for money, the devil himself when you refused. On the corner of a side street, a man I thought of as The Last Lehman Brother sometimes slept in a blood-red Porsche.
    The person who most obsessed and terrified me, however, was a gnarled Rastafarian with one dead white eye who conducted his business from outside the betting shop. I called him One-Eyed Bruce. Oh, I had considered showier nicknames (Cyclops Dread?)but the last thing anyone wants is a mythology they can’t live up to. Best Burger opposite the Tube, for instance, whose grisly patties had me memorizing the Portuguese Lord’s Prayer in Mrs. Molina’s latrina. Such names are breeding grounds for disappointment, among other things.
    Sometimes Bruce’s solitary working eye, roving this way and that in search of customers or Babylon, would light upon me watching from the window above and he would crook a long, skeleton finger up and shout, loud enough for the whole street to hear, “
I see you, pussyclot! Come down, pussyclot!”
    On these occasions I would duck back out of sight, draw the curtains from a kneeling position and turn my attention to other matters. My reflection, for instance, which loomed back at me, wide-angled, morose, insistent without ever being so good as to tell me what it insisted. A face like this was how mirrors got broken. Peering into the tarnished oval over the little washbasin I would look for stray hairs growing between my eyebrows that I could tweeze or blackheads on my nose I could squeeze, and wonder, with no small allowance of self-pity, why One-Eyed Bruce had found it in his heart to hate me so.