Head Injuries Read Online Free

No vest for the wicked, hey David? Got a job yet?'
        I had in fact, but Terry didn't stick around long enough for me to tell him what it was. Maureen stumbled into the light shortly after, her face lined as though it had been used as a cats' scratching post. She was sucking on a cigarette like an asthma sufferer using an inhaler. On seeing me, she pulled the collars of her dressing gown around the speckled waste land of her chest and sat beneath a framed certificate which read:
         Sales Person Of The Year (3rd Place): Juicy Fruit Greengrocers (Wolverhampton Branch) awarded to Maureen Wimbush.
        'Is ye room warm enough, Doivid chucky? Ownly, the 'eating's a bit shagged, yer know? Terry's adabashatit but no joy oim afroid. Plenty o blankits if yer cold, luv,' She began picking at the blackish roots of an otherwise strawberry blonde bob. I said the room was fine, after managing to decode her polyglot. Assembling my lunch, I declined her invitation to sit and chat. The last time I did that, she'd told me all about the weepy nature of the cyst in her armpit.
        I ate my eggs while watching the local colour scoot in and out of peeling doors or tap at engines with spanners. Girls who looked young enough to be sitting in the prams they pushed wandered by in twos while a stray pack of dogs had a meeting by the bins across the road.
        I thought about Helen. What was wrong? Was it simply that she missed us and wanted to breathe life into the volatile mix the three of us created? I doubted it. For the first time, I dwelt upon her words, the concern that she felt. Although she had yet to flesh out that anxiety, it was already pricking at me with possibilities. She might be pregnant. She might have contracted a life-threatening disease. Whatever it was, was it enough to warrant her summoning of Seamus and myself? I wondered if I would have answered her distress call had I been living further afield, in London, say, or abroad. Probably. If there was the sniff of her being interested in me again, I had to check it out. Oh me. David Munro, aka Sad Bastard.
        I managed to get out of the guest house unmolested, slightly peeved that I'd be returning to my cardboard hovel later on. The sky looked mightily pissed off, drawing its colour from the dead bowl of sea. I crashed through the well-oiled doors of The Battery just as the first flecks of rain found dry land and suffered the disapproving looks of the regulars as I shed my greatcoat and muscled into the passive scrum at the bar. Helen was there already, buying her second pint.
        We took our drinks over to a far corner where a fruit machine farted tunes at five-minute intervals. A dog curled on an armchair raised its eyebrows at us hopefully, but I hadn't bought any crisps. An old couple sipped halves of bitter and looked into space. But for their infrequent movements, they could have been fashioned from papier-mache, so grey and listless were they.
        Her tongue found the scar. She asked me how I was settling in. She asked me when I started work. And, pleasantries over, she dragged me back into the strange hinterland of ambiguity and evasion we had inhabited at breakfast.
        'I'm not altogether sure why I stayed here after we finished college. Apart from Pol living nearby,' She frowned. 'But I haven't been to see her while I've been here.'
        'Who's Pol?' I asked. My pint was disappearing fast-a sure sign that I was uncomfortable.
        'My grandmother. You do know about her. I have talked about her in the past.'
        I nodded and smiled as though the name had just found some significance.
        'Thing with Pol is,' she continued, 'I never really knew her. Still don't. I only ever saw her at Christmas and that was years ago, when I was still at school.'
        'Seems like a poor excuse to stay here.' I regretted the words but I was fed up of having to watch what I said. If I remembered correctly Helen liked me because