Tamam Shud Read Online Free

pointed high-heeled boots, like a stockman or a dancer or a person willing to suffer to be beautiful. His legs were tanned, in the manner of someone who worked in shorts, and he had what they called ‘bunched’ calf muscles, as seen in people who walk a lot, run long distances, dance or bicycle.
    The easy smugness of death. The face that launched a thousand theories. The Somerton Man passed into mystery, taking all his secrets with him. Courtesy Gerald Feltus .
    I examined the calf muscles of many of my friends, in itself a fascinating if unscientific exercise. (None of them wear high heels, by the way. The definition of high heels in 1949 Adelaide appears to have been about two inches and a riding boot has a two-inch heel so the boot doesn’t slip through the stirrup iron.) The bunched calf muscles, which look so good in trunk-hose, belonged to a middle distance runner, three medieval dancers, five bicyclists, several inveterate hikers, a rock-climber, a mountaineer, a rider and one ballet dancer, who had calf muscles like rocks. Somerton Man may have followed one – if not all – of these occupations, although he was probably not a ballet dancer. (Only because he was too old, I hasten to add.) Of course, if he was a cargo master, he would have had to walk miles every day, around decks and up and down companion ways, all day.
    Somerton Man’s fingerprints. Despite all the cross-checking of police records, no trace of the man’s identity could be found.
    His age was estimated as ‘about fifty’. He had only three small scars on his body – no tattoos, barcode or other marks. The absence of tattoos is significant because most working men at that time had tattoos. My father had lots. I used to call him the illustrated man, from a Ray Bradbury story he gave me to read when I was eight. My father’s first tattoo, a black cat was on his inner wrist, placed there when he was underage with a forged permission from his own father. There were two hula girls, one on each thigh. A full rigged ship on his arm. Jeannie (my mother’s name) on his other arm. A swallow, the navy’s good luck bird, which signifies land, and more on his chest. I thought they were bold and fascinating. As he grew old, the hair over the illustrations turned grey, making him look ancient and shamanic, blue lines visible through the silver fur.
    The urge to decorate the body with ink has been with the male ever since poor Bronze Age Otzi, murdered on the way to Italy, his body only revealed when a glacier in the Otztal Alps melted. Any visit to a swimming pool in my youth yielded hours of tattoo watching. There is not a decorative mark on Somerton Man, however, and his ears were not pierced. Almost all sailors had a pierced ear, done when the seaman crossed the equatorial line, usually by the cook with a cork and a baling needle. Even my brother, who builds ships, has one pierced ear, as did my father. But officers usually did not have their ears pierced and Somerset Man’s ears were pink and perfect. In my view, he was not a working-class man.
    His neat hands bear this out. There were three small scars inside his left wrist, a curved one-inch scar inside his left elbow and a round mark, possibly from a boil, on his upper left forearm. Those scars on his left wrist confirm my belief that he was a seaman. I have seen them before.
    Someone who wears an oilskin, standing in salt seaspray, gets the sleeve of his non-dominant hand wet and the sleeve then scrapes across his inside wrist, where the skin is thinner. Salt is a powerful abrasive. It produces scrapes, then sores and then scars. A cargo master on a ship, giving orders about stowage in heavy weather, might easily have such scars. Somerton Man was probably right handed because it is his left wrist that has what the fishermen call ‘gurry sores’.
    I met many of my father’s wharfie friends and a lot of them had been sailors. They used to gather