Freedom Island Read Online Free Page A

Freedom Island
Book: Freedom Island Read Online Free
Author: Andy Palmer
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shrine to ex-girlfriends, a museum of failed romance scattered with gifts I didn’t know how to throw away. A hand-made picture on the wall, a decorated love letter in a cupboard, the teddy bear on the sofa still with the label on, a painted egg and a number of books that all had to remain hidden because of the mistaken loving inscriptions on their insides. There were secret love notes in coloured crayon, crafted and hidden, that could still turn up at any moment to rip my heart out. And the souvenirs were in my mind too, in my actions. I had picked up something useful from each of them; one had trained me to wash my hands on returning home, another a more effective way to peel an orange and to suck aspirins before swallowing them, another how to clean my glasses with warm water and soap and to mix marmalade with natural yoghurt, and yet another to run my wrists under cold water on hot days to cool down. I’d even learnt that I could read in the bath. In the wardrobe, shirts I hadn’t worn for years, out of style, a little too small now, each carrying their memories. There was no escaping the regret: an elaborate tapestry of regret.
              Motionless, I warmed myself at the TV, its bright colours beautiful against the grey beyond. The graveyard outside hardly helped, despite the fresh flowers, and for a moment I pondered on whether I would in fact feel any different were it Paris out there. I scratched my head. For a year or so I’d patrolled another greener district checking the advertisements people would tape to lamp-posts offering flats for rent or to sell, until I’d begun to suspect the local dogs and tramps were starting to recognise me.
              The phone pierced the silence. My elder twin, Dave, the first-born by a couple of minutes, normally called on weekends—so this was unusual. I had increasingly come to dread the unfulfilled expectations of our parents; the need to accept an ambiguous culpability for my solitary circumstances; and the need to do more of what I already hated doing in order to satisfy them. So rather than call them, I used Dave as messenger instead.
              Dave had kids, two boys—Tim and Tom. The boys were tiring. But that’s not to say I didn’t like them; I did. They understood me, better than anyone, trailing along behind like Donald Duck’s nephews. Even as babies, they would stare at me as though they’d lived it all before, or had just come through a training course in empathy from God. On the other hand, I was witnessing their evolution into objects of envy, maturing to date spirited, pretty girls for whom I would be too old, sporting haircuts identical to those that were fashionable when it had been my turn to be young. And so when I heard my brother’s voice I was filled with affection and discomfort, belonging and isolation, convenience and interruption; none of which prepared me for what was to come:
              ‘Ollie,’ my brother said, ‘Mum’s died . . .’
              He kept on talking but I was no longer listening: in one mind-burning second everything collapsed. My mother filled my mind; for all her asthmatic wheezing, she had always been indestructible! She had, after all, been the last woman in Pratt’s Bottom to be ceremonially dragged through the neighbouring villages on a tree trunk by the single men for not marrying by the age of twenty-six. The following year one of them did finally become her husband and subsequently my father, thus officially saving her from a life of spinsterism. She would always be there, uncomplaining; wheezing but wise. How could I continue? Suddenly everything looked different. The walls seemed to be made of paper; I could have walked right through them.
     
     


    Gonville Broomhead was a lumbering giant. He lurched and crashed into things, willy nilly, for he simply had less space to manoeuvre than everyone else. But it was
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