How to Disappear Read Online Free Page A

don’t go anywhere much. I have travelled. Widely. But now I stay here. I can hardly get it together to go into Victoria to have my eyes tested.’
    â€˜I met some Gozitans on the boat. They said that sailing up to Sicily was like sailing to civilisation. Did you find that?’
    He thinks a while before replying: ‘It probably depends on what you’re looking for.’
    In a place like Victoria, with nothing to do at night, with no radio or television or company in my room, I rediscover the fantastic power of cinema. I hunger for every film that comes on at the Aurora or Astra, any piece of trash. At the Aurora this evening I’ve seen Diamond Skulls, about extreme nastiness among the British upper classes. The Aurora’s auditorium was built on a lavish scale in the nineteenth century, but gutted by fire, later refitted in the Festival of Britain style, and to-night there was a distinct pong of rotting fish weaving about inside. A mere two dozen customers partook of this giant space for the Saturday night show. And there was an interval. A proper one in the middle of the programme. Haven’t known a proper interval at the cinema since the double-film shows of my boyhood or the two-part epic films of my adolescence. But they had one here. Of course it was a bit odd: they simply stopped the film mid-reel halfway through. Nobody did anything; no girl in a bonnet came round with ice creams on a tray slung from her neck; the film ground to a halt, the lights – red by the way – came up for ten minutes, went down again, and the film flickered back into life.
    But this wasn’t all that happened, because when the lights came up, bringing a break from the murderous mayhem on screen, I stood up to stretch my legs, looked round the great blood-red space, the mother of all wombs – and saw that man again, the traffic lights one, the man who’d vanished into the rocks. He was sitting about eight rows behind me and over to the left. I didn’t like to stare because his dark features were lost in the umbra and I’d be unable to determine his eye. But it was the frowning one all right. I decided to walk out to the foyer as an excuse for a better glimpse of him, and as I passed he held his eyes rigidly ahead, deliberately not looking at me. Therefore – yes – he’d noticed me too. On coming back in, I didn’t return to my former place but sat three rows behind him and observed how the red lamps reflected on his black curls. When the film restarted I was only tenuously reabsorbed by its unpleasant narrative. Quite a lot of the time I meditated on the back of the frowning one’s head until – I don’t know how it happened – it wasn’t there any more. He’d gone. The man had gone. How could he have left without my noticing? He couldn’t have done that. But he had. There was a quick flutter of panic. I felt ridiculous. I suppose I’d been more attentive to the film than I thought and he’d subtly slipped away. Who is he? And why is he playing these tricks on me?
    Gozo is not fashionable. The last notables to live here were Nicholas Monsarrat who took to drink but who was writing up to a week before his death from cancer, and Anthony Burgess who’d taken to drink long before arriving and ‘who complained,’ said Gregory, ‘that Maltese Government censorship was so bad that he couldn’t receive some of his own books!’ The reason for its unfashionable-ness is the food, which if anything is even worse than on Malta, which means it’s the worst food I’ve ever encountered, worse even than Poland’s (my visit to Russia lay in the future). They simply have no awareness of nutrition or taste at all, and the food shops are filled with rock-hard rubbish and are often dirty. But there’s a small supermarket selling British and German tins and sadly (on those days when I can’t face another hotel pizza or