Jesus Wants Me For a Sunbeam Read Online Free

‘Maybe.’
    They sat in silence, stunned: Rick even more than his wife, mystified by the origins of these words that had jumped from his mouth, unpremeditated. With his chopsticks he poked a wad of rice into that mouth, and chewed, allowing himself a little thinking time.
    Linda saved him from further inspirations; she came up with a more convincing theory: ‘I think it’s merely selfish. They want someone to go
with
them.’
    Rick swallowed his food. ‘Like the Egyptian pharaohs,’ he said, ‘taking their whole households into the pyramids, buried alive.’
    Their thoughts were back in harmony.
    ‘Or the rajahs in India,’ she said, remembering a movie she had seen as a child, ‘burning their wives on their own funeral pyres.’
    She shuddered, then jerked up out of her chair as if disguising the shudder in a larger, more deliberate movement. Finding herself on her feet, she moved down the hall, and softly, protectively, closed the doors to the bedrooms where the children slept.
    ‘This is morbid,’ she whispered as she returned. ‘How did we get onto this?’
    ‘The news.’
    ‘Let’s talk about something else.’
    Her husband resisted one last time; still tantalised, perhaps, by his earlier heresy: ‘I know it’s unpleasant, but should we turn our backs on the world?’
    ‘If we can’t change it, what’s the point? I don’t want to
know
about those ugly things. I don’t see why I should have to.’
    She watched him, waiting for agreement.
    ‘We do what we can,’ she repeated. ‘We do our bit. Why should we thrust our noses in it?’
    She was right, he knew. You had to draw chalklines, erect barricades. There was so much pain and misery in the world you would drown in it: a great ocean of pain, of which the cathode-ray tube sprayed only a few selected drops in their direction each night. With the zeal of a convert, or of a fresh runner in a relay, he took the argument from her and carried it further:
    ‘Maybe we should sell the television. Or give it away. Get rid of it altogether. Especially with the children getting older.’
    They watched each other for a few further seconds. At length Rick rose, and wedged open the back door.Without a word he unplugged the television set, carried it outside and heaved it into the backseat of his car. A theatrical gesture, perhaps — the disgraced television would sit there for several days, tamely buckled in a rear seat-belt, before being traded in for a new sound-system — but both felt somehow cleaner, even purified: a satisfaction akin to the sweet aftermath of spring-cleaning.
    New routines quickly replaced the old. Their evenings were filled with music, with educational games — Scrabble, crosswords, Trivial Pursuit — and, once again, with books.
    The young couple had inherited a reverence for books. Both had brought several tea-chests packed with books to the marriage: an intellectual dowry of children’s books, old school texts, gift-sets of Shakespeare and Shaw and Jane Austen and assorted Brontës, plus, from Linda’s side, everything that Dickens had ever written: a metre-length, at least, of matching volumes, bound in calf, plus assorted dogeared school-paperback editions of the same. These had multiplied in the years since: each Christmas they received as gifts almost as many books as they gave. Their shelves — makeshift constructions of plank and brick — were crammed: unread books, many of them,but their presence alone was reassuring, their names were a kind of incantation, like the names of saints or household gods: small geometric household gods of learning and self-improvement and uplift; protectors against ignorance. The books had worn more sacred with time. They were dipped into, like the Bible, as sources of quotations, and poetry, and Trivial Pursuit clues — but seldom read.
    Until now. Delivered from television, Linda decided they should read aloud to each other every night, as they had in the first days of marriage, before