Thought Crimes Read Online Free Page A

imperceptive, but she’d been that too.
    The subeditor then told a story that he’d never mentioned in their three years together.
    â€˜My first girlfriend, Donna, committed suicide when she was eighteen. She’d drink till she was nearly paralytic, and slash-up. I know that makes her sound mad, or wild, but Donna was quiet. Smart, with a good family … Pretty. Too pretty really. She had big breasts. I never saw that as a bad thing, but she hated the way men looked at her. Always saying she wished someone would hack them off. Donna hated them. She was nothing more than her breasts. Even if she’d had them reduced, or had a leg cut off, I still could have loved her … Most girls – most girls who think like her – they stop eating, or they do something to stop being women. But Donna threw herself under the Sandringham train … A school like Prospect … A school like Prospect might have saved Donna’s life.’
    â€˜It might have,’ Karen said.

‘Remember that a person’s name is to that person the sweetest and
most important sound in any language.’ DALE CARNEGIE
    Grace says that I should stand up for myself. I’ve been playing bass for Dylan for thirty-two years, and he doesn’t even know my name. Once in a while, Bob says, ‘Man, what was that shit you played on Quinn?’, and I tell him the amp crashed, and that’s pretty much the sum of our conversations. When Grace says, ‘You’ve got kids at college … If he doesn’t know your name, how will he pay you?’ I say that you don’t bother a genius with trivia like back pay. Eventually, Bob’ll see that I get my due.
    Grace hasn’t been with me all that time. Our paths didn’t cross when she was on the catwalk, or singing ‘Walking in the Rain’ and ‘I’ve Seen That Face Before’, and I guess she never imagined then that fate would fix her up with a plodder like me. If you check out the old photos, Grace looks so dangerous, really formidable, and you wouldn’t believe that she’s quite petite, or that she’d sing when she dries the dishes. Whenever she gets moody and tells me how lucky I am to be living with Grace Jones, I remind her that Bob Dylan doesn’t know her name either.
    It might be easier for us to live in a city full of people whose names Bob didn’t know, but geography’s tricky like that. Our local school crossing attendant is Jeff Lynne, who played with Bob in the Wilburys. His old band, ELO, sold container loads. I never heard them, but Grace says they were shit. Not that she’d say that to his face, because Jeff ’s a Wilbury, and a producer, and knowing a producer with clout makes a lot of difference when you’re begging for a recording budget.
    No question, Bob knows Jeff ’s name, and when the two of them tell their old stories about Roy, George and Tom, Bob uses Jeff ’s name maybe one sentence in a dozen. ‘Well, yeah, that’s what you say, Jeff. I don’t remember that.’ Dylan even sends him cards from different gigs, but that’s the thing, when he sends him a postcard of a fat woman by the pool at the Bucharest Hilton, it’s always ‘Mr Geoff Lynne’. Geoff with a G, not Jeff with a J.
    Jeff says that Bob’s just got the English Geoff mixed up with the more phonetically obvious American Jeff, and that’s OK. An understandable mistake. With Jeff born in Birmingham, you’d expect him to be the English Geoff with a G, not the Cold War fighter pilot Jeff with a J. Mr and Mrs Lynne got it arse-about trying to be fancy, and it’s hardly Bob’s fault that logic lets him down. But Grace says that not being able to spell someone’s name is exactly the same as not knowing it. Best not to argue that point because it’s something she gets strident about.
    Maybe it’s a Jamaican thing, but Grace has a two-directory view