Little Caesar Read Online Free

light of frame herself, could have produced these.
    ‘Maureen and Mary are the only ones who could stay. Kathleen and Jane had to get back. Maureen’s staying another week. After that I’ll be on my own. I came to England for Warren. I don’t like England. But I never regretted it a day in my life, following him. Now there’s nothing for me here anymore. Only his grave. They’ – here she nodded towards the kitchen – ‘say I should come back. But that’s exactly what I ask myself, boy: should you stay where your love is buried, is that where your home is? Or is it with your children?’
    Mary came out of the kitchen with glasses and put them down carefully, as though they were eggs that could roll off the tabletop. I jiggled my shoulders, made nervous by the question.
    ‘I don’t know, Catherine. Since this thing here, since the house disappeared, I’m not sure anymore about places. I don’t think I’m the right person to ask. My tendency would be to . . .’
    ‘Go on.’
    ‘I was thinking about people whose days are like grass, like a flower of the field and the wind passes over it and no-one knows where it stood.’
    ‘Isn’t that a psalm?’ Mary asked.
    I nodded and screwed the cap off the bottle.
    Catherine said, ‘Say that again.’
    ‘That’s all I know, just those lines.’
    ‘So recite them again.’
    I smiled and shook my head. It was a psalm that had been read at my mother’s cremation, I had felt the meaning of every single word, the grass, the flowers, the wind. All of it so fleeting, so fragile. Above her glass, Mary’s eyes flashed back and forth between her mother and me. She was not going to break the crystal of silence.
    ‘Marthe,’ Catherine asked me then, ‘was she cremated?’
    ‘Ashes. What she really wanted was to be burned beside the Ganges.’
    A searing trail down my gullet.
    ‘But Winschoten was good enough in the end.’
    ‘Mother,’ Mary said, ‘without Warren this house won’t be here in a few years. In ten years everything will be gone. Are you going to wait for that to happen?’
    Catherine didn’t respond. She stared into space, her gnarled, weathered hands around the glass, as though warming herself at the fire inside it. The second hand on the plastic clock thumped like a pile-driver. We sat there and breathed.

    When I sang ‘Summertime’ in the bar that evening, it made me feel more melancholy than bright and breezy. ‘Your daddy’s rich, and your mamma’s good lookin’, so hush little baby, don’t you cry . . .’ Summer and youth overlapped in the lullaby, as they did in so many people’s memories. But it wasn’t the right moment for ‘Summertime’, the bar was in a relieved, Friday-evening mood. Leland worked the beer pumps as though racing a handcar down the tracks, you could tell he was born for the publican’s life.
    I kicked in to ‘Candle in the Wind’, which has always made the English go all melty ever since Elton John transposed it from Marilyn Monroe to Lady Di. ‘Goodbye England’s rose, may you ever grow in our hearts’ – by that time the average Brit has already traded in his solid matter for something more liquid.
    I peeked out of the corner of my eye and saw a woman at one of the tables. She wore a black turtleneck beneath her fitted jacket. Her head seemed somehow to float independently of her body. I studied her pale, sensitive face, the portrait of a Catalan princess. She let the fluid in her glass rock like an ocean swell. Round eyes, cornflower blue like a baby doll’s, with those heavy eyelids that open and shut when you shake her. She was the girl who is left, of her own choosing, once all the other girls have been taken home. She says, ‘It doesn’t matter. You get used to it.’
    When she comes, she weeps. Not out loud, but when your fingers touch her face in the darkness you feel the tears on her cheeks.
    When at last I picked up on the lively buzz coming from the other side of the piano, it gradually