Little Hands Clapping Read Online Free Page A

his narrow bed and pulled the white sheet over his body. He looked into the darkness. The street was quiet, and no noises came from the rooms below. His eyes closed and his mouth opened. No spider crawled in.

V

    The old man rose at six. In bare feet, and still in his nightshirt and nightcap, he began his weekly rounds, making sure there was nothing that would surprise the museum’s proprietor and her husband on their visit. Following the suggested route, he started in Room One, Through The Ages , where he checked the exhibits for damage. The sculpture of Antony and Cleopatra was fine, and so were the portraits of Heinrich von Kleist and Vincent van Gogh, and the holographic representation of the self-immolation of Thích Qung Ðúc. He walked through to Room Two, Reasons Why. Once again nothing had been disturbed, and Hulda’s cleaning had been thorough.
    It was not long before he reached Room Eleven, Familiar Faces , which was situated in the basement and marked the end of the suggested route. On the half-landing hung a large painting of a young Billy Joel, his face contorted in despair as he drank from a bottle of furniture polish. Pavarotti’s wife had read about the singer’s anguish and of his unusual choice of self-administered poison, and when she heard he was coming to the city to play a concert in the castle grounds she had immediately commissioned an artist’s impression of the scene and written a long letter inviting the subject to unveil it. To her mystification he had not responded, and the painting had ended up being hung without fanfare. The old man paid it the minimum of attention as he continued down the stairs and through the doors.
    Room Eleven was the largest of the exhibition spaces. It began with two photographs of Marilyn Monroe: in the first she was subduing her billowing skirt in a promotional still for The Seven Year Itch, and in the second she was lying in the morgue, her beauty gone so completely that it was as if it had only ever been a mirage, or a trick. Then came a photograph of Kurt Cobain’s right leg, a charcoal drawing of Ernest Hemingway, a knitted doll of the Singing Nun, a scale model of the Hollywood sign complete with a four-inch Peg Entwistle plummeting from the top of the letter H, and a dolls’ house with the walls cut away to reveal Sylvia Plath with her head in a gas oven, her children asleep in the next room. Next there was an exceptionally lifelike waxwork of Yukio Mishima in his final moments, his face impassive as he held a sword in his hand, his guts spilling from a slit across his belly. This was the museum’s most photographed exhibit, with tourists taking turns to stand beside it with their thumbs aloft, as if this was Madame Tussaud’s and he was Indiana Jones or Enrique Iglesias. Beside Mishima was an embedded television screen. The old man pushed a button and a minute-long silent film began, showing a re-creation of Virginia Woolf’s fateful wade into the River Ouse, her pockets filled with stones. Without interest he watched it to the end, then moved on to the small but life-size dummies of Hervé Villechaize and David Rappaport, each in their own diorama – Villechaize slumped beside a patio door and Rappaport lying under a bush and being discovered, too late, by curious dogs. This side of the room finished with a cardboard cut-out of a leather-trousered Michael Hutchence, and as the old man passed it he was not surprised to see that on the singer’s hand, the one holding the microphone, somebody had written the words WANKING ACCIDENT . This happened from time to time, and the old man carried the cut-out to the store cupboard and piled it up with all the others that had been defaced by visitors who felt this exhibit had no place in the museum. He was irritated by the thought that at some point he would have to go to the trouble of throwing them away. There were only four clean spares left, and as he took one of them out of the cupboard he knew it would