Cold Eye of Heaven, The Read Online Free Page B

traffic as an excuse to stay put. His eye relaxes into the blur of moving cars, his ear is lulled by the dull arrhythmia of passing sounds. He thinks about snow; man’s strange relationship with it, almost romantic. The way it lures you into a false sense of serenity with its beauty and silence, and yet would do you, given half the chance.
    A few days ago, enchanted as a child, he had stood at the window, watching its dainty arrival. Twilight, and as the light had diminished, the snow had gained momentum. And a sort of yearning had come over him that it would stick to the ground, stay and expand until all the houses and gardens in the estate were swollen with snow. It had grown dark, but he hadn’t turned on the light. He wanted to stay gawking out, without the neighbours seeing him. Even though all over the estate, grinning like simpletons out from dark houses, there were probably others just like him; Mr Kerins around the corner, Mrs Waugh in the house backing onto his; the youngone next door. By morning it had already started to turn vicious,devouring his garden, killing his little plants, freezing the blood in his body. Laying siege to him too, making him afraid, making him worry. About food and fuel and the fact that he’d no candles if the electricity went. About the fact that boy scouts don’t call any more. Nobody did, nobody would. Not even the girl next door. And yet for all that? He had stood out in the back garden mourning all that had perished, while at the same time he’d been filled with an inexplicable belief in life, feeding the birds with bits of fruit pulled out of the back of the fridge – stupid fuckin tears in his eyes! He had said out loud, ‘I don’t want to leave this; I don’t want this to be my last snow.’ Wherever that morbid thought had come from! Of course, he hadn’t known about your man in Wexford at that stage or he probably wouldn’t have chanced going out in the first place. Garden or no garden. Birds or not. Elderly, the news had said the man was. Sixty-five years old? Since when did sixty-five become
elderly
?
    Behind him a bus screeches and stops. From the corner of his eye the shapes of passengers alighting, tiny and blurred, spilling out of his eyes like tears. He blinks and his vision almost settles. Two youngones, school bags to bosoms, step up beside him, faces turned to the traffic, knees slightly bent as if waiting to jump into the turn of a skipping rope. He decides to take the lead from their young eyesight, placing one foot off the kerb onto the road. But the youngones are too quick for him, and are across the road before he can think, in the careless half-run, half-walk of limbs that don’t have to worry about falling. Two men come up behind him, yoddling to each other in foreign voices. Farley wonders if maybe they’re his neighbours, the housemates of the little gnome next door. They step around and stand right in front of him as if he just isn’t there. Big brawny lumps smelling of baby talc. They don’t even break their stride as they cross over, in fact one car has to slow down to facilitate them. Finally, there’s a father holding his daughter’s hand, patiently listening with a tilted ear. The child breathless to report every inch of her story which they take between them across the wide busy road. Leaving Farley alone.
    He looks up the road. Traffic herding over a crest in the distance. There’s definitely something the matter with his eyes. The cold maybe? Because it feels like he’s looking through a skin of ice. Shapes tumbling into one another, breaking into pieces, then re-forming again. He closes his eyes and shakes his head. When he opens them again, one side of his vision is completely blotted out. A speck of dirt maybe. He pulls his right eyelid to one side, stretching it out, until bit by bit the darkness disperses. He steps back up onto the kerb and passes over the grass verge