The Ruby Slippers Read Online Free Page B

taking things from the shelves, denying it even when they found the items in his pockets. Had he himself not bent over backwards to keep him on long after others told him to make the best of a bad thing and let the boy go? It hurts Michael to recall how Harrison had accused them of picking on him when all they ever wanted was for the boy to make a go of things. It was him, so pig-headed and twisted in his thinking, going out of his way to be anything but good, that had forced their hand. And in the end, what with Grace having gotten so weighed down with anxiety that she became ill, the kid had left him no choice.
    He peers across at the record-store entrance. The youths are no longer there. He counts back through the years, surprising himself: more than three since they let Harrison go. Three years – my God, the boy is a man now, pretty much, and still hanging around on corners, making nothing of himself. Michael slings back his head, drains the cup and goes back inside. The neat little Filipino maid woman is waiting patiently at the cold-meat counter. A polite, respectful person to serve. That’s something nice in the day at least.
    ■ ♦ ■
    The smallest room in the house contains the biggest and ugliest of truths. Just to haul his dead weight from the wheelchair onto the toilet seat and back again has become an ordeal that leaves Malachi McBride holed-through. And in between, there are the pitiful fumblings and spillings that slay him with the knowledge that he is failing by the day. He has grown fearful of this place. With its anaemic tiles and ghostly mirrors, the bathroom is as heartless as any church confessional. At every angle, he sees his alienation captured and cast back, dead-eyed in the glass. And his other senses play their part in the same unnerving conspiracy. Fragrances belonging to soaps and lotions bring to McBride’s mind the sacraments, with incense in ghostly trails, turning his thoughts to mortality and, of course, to God: God the voyeur, the sadist; the mocking, sniggering bastard God! If he were a child he would cry and his mother would come and smooth away his tears. But there is no mother to come running, and this is a man who will not cry even in secret. He thinks instead about the true worth of the fortune he has amassed. What he wouldn’t give just to be able to stand square at the toilet and piss into it, a man again. But no, he will not cry, he will not open himself to pity, and he would punish anyone foolish enough to offer it. The world must pay.
    Rinsing his hands at the washbasin, McBride hears the click of the latch out in the hallway. The nursemaid, Inez, has returned. Not even stopping to dry off, he spins the chair, flicks the lever and lunges the machine at the door, the kick plate slamming against a gash of wood in the paintwork that testifies to past injuries. The door flies open, and there he catches her, dramatized in shadows, wide-eyed like the heroine – or is it the victim? – in a silent movie. He knows that she will have stopped off at St Joe’s on the way home to light candles and pray for everything under the sun. He is certain of it; he can all but smell the ghastly place on her, and it inspires him with words to shake her from her cosy Catholic notions: ‘The day is fast approaching, my little rosebud,’ he declares, giving a jolly little tilt of the head and oozing a terrible kind of delight, ‘when you are going to have to wipe my sorry ass for me.’
    A hair’s breadth ahead of him, Inez hangs her coat on the door, turns smartly away and carries her groceries into the kitchen, prompting him to pump up the volume: ‘When it’s easier to slit your wrist than take a shit, you just have to start thinking!’ Inez opens the refrigerator door and buries herself in domestic intricacies. Cheerily, she clucks away to herself: ‘Now did I or did I not already buy tomatoes?’
    McBride heads for the kitchen, even so, noticing in a glance through the living-room