What Becomes Read Online Free Page B

What Becomes
Book: What Becomes Read Online Free
Author: A. L Kennedy
Tags: Fiction, Short Stories (Single Author)
Pages:
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too deeply, the din of it ripping something in his head. But even that had gone eventually, and there had been silence and he had tried to kiss her and she had not allowed it.
    That was when he had taken his bag and left the room, the house, the town, the life.
    I miss her, too.
    Behind Frank, the projector stuttered and whirred, light springing to the screen and sound this time along with it. He fumbled into his pocket and found his phone, turned it off. That way he wouldn’t know when it didn’t ring, kept on not ringing.
    Frank tipped back his head and watched the opening titles, the mist, the trees, the older man’s face as it spoke to the small girl’s, as he spoke to his daughter. And the world turned unreliable and lost him and the film reeled on and he knew that it would finish and knew that when it did he would want nothing more than to start it again.
    WASPS
    Their da going away again, that’s all it was. Both boys saying nothing about it, but awake at five and thumping downstairs and straight out to the garden, Jimbo still wearing pyjamas and Sam in his yesterday’s clothes, probably no pants – some objection he has at the moment to pants, as if they were practically nappies and grown-ups never wore them. The first fight beginning as soon as they left the house: she has a memory of dozing through whole cycles of shouts and squealing and that odd, flat roar Sam has started to produce whenever he truly abandons himself and just rages. No tantrums for Sam, not any more. He is seven now. He has the real thing. He has rage.
    And the morning was out of its balance already, aggressive. Orange-pink light had been creeping forward and threatening by four, summer pushing everything earlier and earlier whether you wanted it to or not, and the bed too hot and what might be called a real gale had been rising outside until her sleep was full of its pressure against the corner of the house, air leaning so hard at the window glass that she felt breathless and unsettled, searched by a hunger that needed, that pried.
    The house grew disturbed, doors pestering at their frames whenever the weather drew breath: clatters on the roof, something twisting, scouring overhead, and meanwhile she dreamed a little of being underwater, swimming the length of an assault course, both a game and an assault course, in some kind of terrible amusement park. She was fully dressed, heavy, but doing her best to thread a way along flooded passages, over ramps, gasping up into sudden pockets of lovely air and then driving herself back down to find this or that opening into caves, or water-filled dining rooms, church halls, or a place like a fishmonger’s shop, except every fish in it still alive – tethered by hooks through the bodies and heads, fluttering by the white-tiled walls and hanging in strings of blood, staring at her while she kicked and wallowed past.
    All the time, she’d kept thinking, ‘I shan’t bring the children here, it seems unsafe. There must surely be someone I could inform, a procedure to follow for complaints. What I need is a higher authority – one I would ask to set right.’
    The logic of it mostly faded as she woke, but she had been left with a definite shame, the embarrassed an-ticipation that she might drown, be lost somewhere in the game when nobody else had a problem with it, because it was, in fact, so simple and undemanding – like a tunnel of love, or a ghost train, a romp round the funhouse mirrors and then back to have your tea.
    By the time she leaned round and looked at the alarm it was getting on for half past seven, and the boys were still noisy, loud against the weather. Which was how they dealt with it – the leaving – by giving each other reasons to cry and reasons to be angry. Their father was curled on his side, hands tucked under his chin and offering her that face, the one that always made her think he wasn’t sleeping, was only waiting
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