The A-Z of Us Read Online Free Page B

her that it was all right, that it was a stupid competition and everyone would have forgotten about it in the morning. He wanted to tell her to lose, deliberately, if she was feeling uncomfortable. Then the bell pealed. The next pizza, a Neptune with anchovies, proved more difficult to swallow. Ian glanced up as he ripped into the final piece to see the blonde gulp down her last crust. He was third, and out.
    He thought about leaving, but he wanted to see what the shy girl with the large appetite would do. He bought a pint and stood opposite her, then the bell rang and he watched carefully as she ignored all the male voices, nimbly folding the nine-inch Spicy American, complete with chilli sauce, cramming it into her mouth. It was a big mouth, Ian noted. He wondered for a moment what it would be like to have his cock in that mouth, but then she gagged on the chilli, turned, and threw up.
    The four lanky boys behind her leapt away, shouting and gesticulating as vomit spattered their shoes. Everyone cheered. The blonde girl grabbed a napkin and threw up again, pizza splattering the table. Instinctively, Ian stepped to her side, grasped a pile of napkins, handed them to her and pulled her arm.
    â€˜Come on! The toilet!’
    The blonde looked up at him, morsels of vomited pepperoni clinging to her chin and cheeks, and said quietly:
    â€˜I’m Gemma. Very pleased to meet you.’

B ELIEF
    I was looking for a map. My father, the Reverend John Thompson, loved old maps, in particular anything purporting to be of the Holy Land, pre-1948. I loved them too. They made cheap presents, and they made dad happy. Which was something I didn’t seem to achieve very often.
    The antiques market took place at strange times, never on the same day. Occasionally I would be in the area and make a quick detour to the Old Seamen’s Hall on Gutter Lane, but it would be closed. The randomness of the market’s openings intrigued me. There was no number to call, you just had to turn up and hope. It was a canny marketing move. It meant that if you were lucky enough to find the hall open, you were so overjoyed and grateful that you ended up spending far too much money on secondhand junk.
    Not that I was lavish. I couldn’t exactly afford to be. As a freelance travel writer, I sometimes got to stay in five-star hotels in exotic locations, but I rarely made more than £2,000 a month from my articles, before tax.
    And now, even this meagre income was in doubt, following my early morning meeting at the newspaper.
    I limped carefully past the antiques market’s trestle tables adorned with the immaculately arranged detritus of other people’s lives, neatly delineated like museum exhibits – umbrellas, old brass lamps, an animal skull, a strangeblunt tool that might once have been used for amateur dentistry or bludgeoning hedgehogs. The secondhand map stall was hidden at the back of the hall as usual, beneath a low coving.
    The bald old man sat behind his table wearing his customary baggy cardigan that looked like his mother might have knitted it sometime during the First World War, and a cloth cap that appeared to have been molested by a small rodent. He nodded at me, then glanced down at my left leg and the heavy white plaster cast that began just below my knee, before returning to his newspaper crossword.
    I leaned my crutch gently against one of the cardboard boxes, unbuttoned my linen shirt sleeves and began my search.
    The five cardboard boxes were precisely labelled – Americas, Africa, Australasia, Europe, Asia – but I knew from experience that the maps never lurked in the right sections. Here, the world was shifted into chaos – Burgundy could be found in the Middle East, whilst Lebanon sometimes turned up in the Western Isles of Scotland. It was a fluid atlas, full of bizarre geographical partnerships.
    I started methodically with the Americas, in the hope that a map of Judea might be loitering in New