Cruel Crazy Beautiful World Read Online Free

other than the pigeon shit wiped off their glossy red hats. She loves their jolly mouths rimmed in snowy white for being forever amused by her mutterings. They never burp beer fumes at her. Nor do they leer at other women. Mazel tov is all they ever say. Lucky star. Yet the stars have not been kind to her. In their mouths mazel tov is just another way of saying such is life .
    She can’t bear the way Zero licks his fingers to turn the page when he reads the paper, nor his tacky spinal tattoo of a mango-titted virago, nor his habit of flicking fag stubs into her fuchsias, nor the way he foots her Bengal cat aside. While he’s out cruising after dusk she dozes off in front of her murder mysteries with her cat in her lap, never seeing the killer caught. Or she studies the neat hole left in an avocado by the pip, until it begins to tint sepia. Then she spoons it into her mouth, happy that she no longer has to worry about him smearing her lipstick with whisky-fumed lips.
    Phoenix has a theory that my mother’s so hooked on murder mysteries because she gets to vicariously kill Zero over and over again. And that old Zero’s in the dark about this.
    Perhaps Zero and my mother are still tenuously twinned in this knack for never being caught red-handed.
    All the years I studied at university neither my mother nor her opals were rubbed to draw their fire to the surface. She exudes so stoic and islanded an aura that I seldom hold her, the woman who bears the shimmering scars of my unfurling in her womb. The woman whose milk I sucked and who read Alice in Wonderland to me as she tucked me in at night.
    I sigh at not having to witness my mother drift ever further into her wordless, wary, gnomic world. Or to catch her again in the dark on grass all blue with fallen jacaranda flowers, lying fat and naked and deathly white, as if raped by the moon.
    Though Zero’s a dog, I have to confess there’s something of his eye for girls in me. My heart skips a beat when the southeaster flips up the skirt of a stockinged girl. I too have gawped at the copper hips and jiggling moons of the Loop Street go-go girls. And yet my old man’s lip-licking at the sight of a scant skirt renders me somehow ashamed of being a man.
    Am I a man, then? Is a man as scared of the random hop of frogs as I am? Does a man blow kazoooing bubbles through a straw in the lees of a mojito? Does a man cry freely during a film? Does a man just let his mother fade out? Does a man bow to his old man’s plan for him instead of heading out into the world to seek his fortune?
    I feel like a white-clay boy who has been exiled from his mother’s hut to wander ghost-like through the bundu till I become a man. This time now, in this boondocks place, is my bundu time. It may not be hard-core bundu , I may not have to kill things or dig up roots, but it is nevertheless where I’ll have to learn to survive alone. I’d rather just play my guitar and whimsically pen poems, maybe travel to see the world: Galway, Sienna, Malacca, Saigon, Mandalay. Yet I feel I have to undergo this exile if I am ever to free myself from my old man.
    A hidden gecko chirps at this daunting thought.
    Zero listlessly plucks a few strings of my guitar. You can hear that the feeling for it is still in his fingers though he hasn’t played his guitar for years, ever since the thing that can never be undone happened.
    I fling the window ajar. I look out over the sweep of Walker Bay. I smell a fusion of salt and rotting kelp and seagull guano. Feathery wave froth fuses with white sky.
    The world lies under a skin of dust. Sounds warp as if played on a tape left too long in the sun. Wind gusts off the sea, chucking scraps of paper about.
    I pick up a flyer advertising pizza.
    Two gaunt black dogs hide from the wind in a capsized forty-gallon drum in a corner of the empty market square. They curl floppy pink lips to flash their canines at us.
    Zero squints at a flapping map of the market layout to find his