The Last Supper Read Online Free

names he writes out in full. They are unknown people, though at a certain level – police files, prison records, social security databases – their citations are as numerous and indelible as ACC’s own. This explains part of his attraction to them. But now he wants a new name to call himself when he looks through the camera lens. I suggest Ace, or even The Ace. It seems to me to be just what is required. Go on, I say; why don’t you?
    We are barrelling towards Paris now, which sits on the map like a great glamorous spider in its web. The road has become crowded. There are old, slouching cars with winking indicators and big glittering ogre-like cars with black windows, tiny battered cars with frantic plumes of smoke fluttering from their exhausts and cars towing enormous caravans. There aretrucks and lorries and untidy vans of every description, all blaring their horns. The children play Sweet and Sour out of the window. They wave and smile at everyone who passes. The Sweets wave and smile back. The Sours don’t. The children keep a tally on a piece of paper. As we near the Paris périphérique the road becomes a torrent, an onward rush of roaring, barging traffic all hurtling with carefree ferocity towards the centre. In a way I would like to join it: I don’t know, perhaps it would be easier. Always the effort of resistance, of counter-motion, of breaking off into what is untried and unknown: yet the unknown seems in its distance and blank mystery to contain for me a form of hope, a strange force that is pure possibility. Overhead the sky has come apart in great fraying scarves of pale grey and blue. Bursts of soft sunlight fall and fade and bloom again on the windscreen of the car. The temperature rises another notch. On the back seat, the census of the human disposition finds that people are in general more sweet than sour. Weaving and hesitating and being abused on all sides we swing gloriously south, on to the Autoroute du Soleil.

French Nights
    Monsieur’s garden is well advanced into springtime, though we left home this morning still in the bitter purview of winter. Here the trees are in leaf and there are flowers in the beds. We have been forwarded like clocks by a whole season.
    But it is April, and spring, in England too. The sullen English skies seem unkind from the sanctuary of Monsieur’s garden, and intentionally cruel; as though the wind and rain that did not modulate by day or night but persisted week after week through February and March, like irreconcilable grief or anger, were the product of temperament rather than latitude. But it is not warmth that I expect from my parent nation: it is beauty, and distinctness. It is delicacy I require and feel cheated of, the delicacy of poets; not warmth, which is for babies. In January, meeting a friend at Bristol airport, I stood at the arrivals gate and watched as people poured in from the Canary Islands, from Tenerife. Back they came, in their shorts and string vests and sombreros, in their tanned orange skin; back they came to the bad-tempered homeland and went whooping out through the automatic doors into its dark and inhospitable evening. In a way I envied them. I have never been able to evade the issue so, with human beings or with anything else. There has to be a reckoning, an accounting. There has, at some point, to be the truth.
    Monsieur answers the door himself, apparently alone except for a proud white stiff-haired little dog that might be Tintin’s Snowy in his comfortable dotage. Who are we, Monsieur wants to know. He stands in the doorway of his château,diffident in scuffed deck shoes and faded canvas shorts that show his weathered knotty legs from the knee, while Snowy struts with arthritic dignity among the flowerbeds. Monsieur is in his late fifties or so, slightly wild haired and abstracted but not unkind looking. He has little fiercely glittering eyes whose irises are a benevolent sky blue. He advertised his château as offering bed and