Little Caesar Read Online Free Page A

lifted me from my low spirits. Leland grinned at me as I kicked in to ‘Take Five’. My presence was his gain. I played the little tune of gratitude as easily as I did the ‘Radetzky March’.
    The evening slipped away, and I took two short breaks. Around eleven I finished my final set with ‘As Time Goes By’, something people had been humming along with for ages. ‘A kiss is still a kiss, a sigh is just a sigh . . .’
    I got up and walked to the bar. The woman put down her glass and nodded at me. From behind the tap, Leland was gesturing to me. What he really wanted to do was yell, like in the rugby club on a Saturday morning after the match. He put a pint down in front of me.
    ‘Good job, Ludwig. Spot on for an evening like this.’
    ‘It was okay, I figured.’
    ‘They were over the moon. What you do is pure cinema, man. With someone like you in the place they think they’re on the Titanic , or in a bar in Casablanca.’
    The beer sang its way through my body. Maybe I’d hang around here for a while, wait for spring to come, at home and away from home, a little cloud of dust that settles.

    I ran into her the next day on the esplanade, the woman from the bar. Her name was Linny Wallace. She said I’d played nicely last night.
    ‘Particularly Gershwin, you put a lot of feeling into that.’
    I told her I liked Gershwin, his lightness, which seemed American to me.
    ‘I’ve never seen you around before,’ she said.
    ‘Just got into town on Wednesday.’
    She worked as an estate agent in Reading. On the beach, in the distance, people were walking their dogs. I told her I had come for a funeral, but had stumbled on this job while I was waiting. That it was, after a fashion, a homecoming, because my mother and I used to live up there on the cliff. We had left this place twelve years ago. Maybe I would stick around for a couple of months, springtime was lovely here.
    ‘And after that, what will you do then?’ she asked.
    ‘After that I don’t know. I’m a grasshopper, I play music while the sun shines.’
    ‘But you cadge firewood from the ant when you get cold,’ said Linny Wallace.
    We followed the walkway south; in the distance you could clearly see the outlines of the reactor at Sizewell – its dome gleamed in the sun.
    ‘I figured you more for someone who belongs on the boulevard at Cannes,’ she said.
    When she laughed, you could see that she was older than me. On Avondale Street we stood and watched an old man and his dog. The animal sat on its backside and used its front legs to pull itself across the pavement, to scratch its itching anus.
    ‘I’ve never seen anything like it,’ Linny Wallace said. ‘As though he’s sledding . . .’
    I said nothing about impacted anal glands, which a pair of expert hands could easily squeeze clean.
    A sort of cheerfulness settled down between us, we laughed at the many expressions of old, guttering life that could be seen around the village. God’s waiting room, it was sometimes called; Alburgh had the highest death rate in all of England. Paradoxically enough, that had to do with the favorable conditions one found here for carefree sunset years. The local shopkeepers lived in the calm certainty of uninterrupted revenues from countless pensions; restaurants and teahouses offered senior citizen discounts of up to twenty percent.
    I told her how, just yesterday, I had stood in the doorway of an off-license, looking at an old man standing beside his scootmobile and messing with his gloves. When I left the shop a few minutes later he was still there. He lived in a different time-space continuum, where you could take a hundred years to put on your gloves without growing impatient.
    From the old days, when I had walked these streets as a boy, I remembered the man who stood still at unexpected places. He always seemed to be deep in thought, in search of who he was and what kind of life he led. When he stopped he would wave his shaky hands out in front of him,