Getting Home Read Online Free

so manipulative.’
    Josh took the packet from her and shook out a cigarette for himself. ‘Do we have an eight o’clock today?’
    Ted Parsons cut down Orchard Close, at the end of which a pedestrianised area, which an amateur might have called a path, led between the gardens into Maple Grove. Being screened by some immense chestnut trees, this route enabled him to walk without being observed.
    The path meandered. Part of the special charm of Maple Grove was that all the streets curved. This also had been decreed by Jackson Kerr, the father of the community. Most authorities attributed Maple Grove to its architect, Tudor Wilde, whose inspiration it had been to take the steep-pitched roofs and homely gables of old Dutch farmhouses and reproduce them here in red brick and white weatherboard.
    The Maple Grove Society held annual lectures on Tudor Wilde, and the Wilde At Heart bar in the Parade kept his name alive and the Art Nouveau tiles he had commissioned on the walls, but in the view of Ted Parsons it was typical of the chattering classes to credit the artist with the achievements of the entrepreneur. The man who really made Maple Grove was its developer, Jackson Kerr, who had dreamed of great profit bred by mating rural charm with urban ease, and ordered that his streets should wander peacefully like straying cows.
    Ted squared up and sprinted the last fifty yards to his gate, which he reached at 7.23 am.
    Aboard the Dawn Treader , Sweetheart watched her father pick up one of his headache pills. His eyes were almost closed and the way he was leaning his head on his hand probably meant he was feeling bad. The question would have to wait.
    He had the pill on the palm of his hand and he was looking at it as if he expected it to move. ‘Sweetheart,’ he said after a little while, ‘did I have these in my gym bag?’
    â€˜They were in the cupboard.’
    â€˜Didn’t I lock the cupboard?’
    â€˜Oh yes, it was locked all up.’ Sweetheart started twisting her hair. There were these things that you found out were wrong only when you had already done them.
    â€˜So how did you get these?’
    She had lost the word. ‘Ummm … with the screwy thing.’
    â€˜What screwy thing?’
    In the end she had to show him. He stood there and looked at the medicine cabinet on the floor, the step ladder, the holes in the wall, the screws she had kept carefully in the top of the coffee tin and the packet of paracetamol on the draining board with two capsules removed and 98 remaining.
    After a while he began to say something like, ‘You’ll make someone a fine carpenter if you live to grow up,’ but he started throwing up towards the end and had to dive for the sink. He stayed there, running the water, for along time.
    â€˜Carpenters are nails. Screws are some other thing.’ Sweetheart could not see his face. She really hated him to cry. ‘Don’t be sad.’
    â€˜I’m not sad.’ He took some of the big breaths that made your stomach go in and out. ‘I’m going to be late for class and you are going to be late for school.’
    By 7.45, Ted Parsons had showered, shaved, dressed and was driving
    down The Broadway towards the 31, feeling optimistic because he
    had avoided speaking to his wife, and his kids had avoided speaking to him. So far, a perfect day. No, a good day. Perfect would have been Gemma Lieberman naked at the window.
    Ahead of him he saw Adam DeSouza run the red light at the junction of Alder Reach. Waiting, he could look down the side road in his wing mirror. A bunch of kids on bicycles. Gemma’s kids? What kind of mother actually let her kids bike to school in this day and age, at risk from paedophiles and drunken drivers?
    The houses in Alder Reach did not appeal to him. Pseudo cottages with half-timbered facades, they nodded to the Wilde style but lacked its generosity. Romance had been the downfall of Jackson Kerr.