The Shouting in the Dark Read Online Free Page B

on the desk-chair’s back, the knuckles still dead-white.
    She steps back quietly, lets herself out onto the verandah, the two untouched cups of coffee still standing there on the glass-topped table, her father’s, her mother’s. She sits on the verandah’s edge, the sun like a burning hand on the back of her neck. A sound of hard breathing and the father is suddenly beside her. He hooks his insteps over the verandah’s edge, as he likes to do, and begins to rock on his heels.
    â€˜Such a weasel whine on the face of Old Europe,’ he snaps at the sky, rocking, ‘So querulous, so snivelling. Oh, our long-lost Har – we’re spending our precious money to tell you, by trunk call no less, our mother left you some old bric-à-brac. Why not just say it plain? That’s all you get, brother, nearly forty years after the event. Guilt money, such a call, utter waste, costs twice as much as the kut -spoons are worth.’
    Ella shifts her eyes carefully to the father’s face. His eyes today are starey, far bluer than normal, as if emptied out. Is he drunk? she wonders. Even for him, it’s very early in the day to be drunk.
    â€˜Why plague me with their links to their past, eh Ella, that’s what I ask?’ He uses her name but it’s not her he’s talking to, she doesn’t think. ‘That’s not the past I want,’ he says, rocking harder.
    Ella moves away to the shade of the hawthorn bush beside the verandah, to where she can watch him between the branches without being seen. He stays put where she left him, glaring so hard he’s almost squinting. He takes his glasses off, polishes both lenses on his shirt, then puts them back on and squints some more.
    â€˜Yes, my Ella’ – again he surprises her – ‘There are some I would like to speak to if I could. But not the most expensive trunk call nor the longest cable could get me a connection to them. Singapore 1940. All the friends. The happy ship, ’44. Then Durban and you, Ella, you . The Singapore friends don’t visit enough to tire of speaking of all that.’
    His eyes sweep upwards, fix on the hilly horizon of his view. He tightens his tie – though he’s freelancing, every day he still wears a tie. He takes his glasses off a second time, rubs his eyes.
    â€˜Of what use are those people in Nederland to me?’ He squints quizzically into the distance through his rubbing fingers. ‘Of what use for that matter, verdomme , is Nederland? Couldn’t they have said all that in a letter? And I’d have said dump it in the bin. None of it’s any use, not now, not ever. When the people one truly – Dead and gone, long forgotten.’
    He shoots a sullen suspicious look over his shoulder. The mother, her face scarlet, has appeared in the frame of the French windows. In her hands is a wooden tray bearing two fresh cups of coffee, a sugar bowl with its mound of white sugar, a silver spoon with the triple-X crest of Amsterdam on the handle.
    â€˜So you finished at last, bawling down that telephone wire?’ The father again faces the hills.
    â€˜It was all over when you took your hands away.’ The mother puts the tray on the rattan table, sits down. ‘It just became noise. I had to apologise for you. You walked off.’
    â€˜They’d said plenty, it was enough. Enough of that useless past, that useless so-called fatherland. Who wants all that back? I don’t. Never asked.’ He thrusts an arm at the sky. ‘This is the country I want.’
    â€˜But I do, Har, I haven’t left all that behind.’ The mother leans forward in her chair, smooths her crimplene slacks down her long thighs. Her expression has turned pleading. ‘So rarely I get the chance nowadays, to speak to your familie , let alone my own familie . . . It’s important to me, you know, our families, my country, a parcel left in the attic by your mother.