Who's Sorry Now? Read Online Free Page A

affront of being almost knocked down by a cocksucker. And lectured to by his best friend – was it a lecture? – about nice sex.
    â€˜And a bottle of Brunello di Montecello,’ he told the waitress. It was time to start that.
    Had they not eaten Chinese for lunch they might well have gone for Indian tonight. Not the poncy stuff. Not cuisine vindaloo, served on big white plates – two dry lamb chops presented with their legs in the air, like Soho pole-dancers, in a baby-powdering of fenugreek. By Indian, the two friends still meant stainless-steel bowls of blistering brown slop, suddenly called balti. They had lived in Indian restaurants in their student days, shovelling down old-fashioned bhunas and madrases in Camden High Street before and after going to see Jack Nicholson movies. Kreitman’s choice; Charlie Merriweather didn’t care for movies and only went to have somewhere quiet to sleep off one curry and dream of the next. Kreitman (who could have passed for an Indian anywhere but in India – Sabu, they had called him at school) even got around to learning to cook festive Indian dishes, sittingcross-legged in the kitchen of his too expensive digs, crumbling saffron and separating sheets of vark, the edible silver leaf of which angels’ tongues are made, with a view to transforming the humble pilau into an offering to the gods. And Charlie? He rubbed his hands and watched. Sometimes he rubbed his stomach and salivated. ‘Knives and forks, Charlie!’ Kreitman would shout. ‘Bowls! Pickles! Spoons!’
    Considering their upbringings – Charlie left to fend for himself at an unheated minor public school near Lewes, Kreitman encouraged to run riot at a progressive in Farnborough and never once to make a bed or rinse a toothbrush if he wasn’t minded – you would have put your money on Charlie turning out the housemaker. But Charlie had been awed by university and fell helpless the moment he got there. His bulk embarrassed him. When he went to lectures, he felt his head was too big and annoyed the people behind. He tried slumping, but that only drew sarcasm from the lecturer who told him that if he was as tired as he looked perhaps he ought not to have got up. He was ashamed of his voice which was too public school for the crowd he had half fallen in with, and too loud as well. ‘Don’t boom at me,’ a girl from Newcasde had told him on what couldn’t quite pass for a date, and that had made him more ashamed and somehow, as though to compensate, more booming still. By the end of his first term he was racked with confusion, a person who was too noisy and too shy, who was too much there and yet not there at all. He drooped disconsolately, like a puppy who had grown too big for its owner and been thrown on to the streets. ‘I’m just waiting for someone to take pity on me,’ he told Kreitman. ‘I’ve taken pity on you,’ Kreitman reminded him. ‘No,’ Charlie said, ‘I mean a woman.’ Someone to take pity on him, adore him, cook him breakfast and give him a good home.
    Whereas Kreitman was putting mileage, fast, between himself and the idea of a man instanced by his father, the Purse King. Sullen at work, sullen back from work, whisky from the cut-glassdecanters on the solid-silver tray on the walnut sideboard, scoff without a thank-you, empty apron, count, curse, packet of Rennies, five spoons of Gaviscon, half a gallon of Andrews Liver Salts, gallstones, ulcer, cancer, heart attack, swear, snore, stroke. Maybe at first the decanters weren’t cut glass, or the tray solid silver, or the whisky single malt, but Rome wasn’t built in a day; by the time the purse empire had extended to two markets, then to three, then to the first of the shops in Streatham High Street – KREITMAN THE RIGHTMAN FOR SMALL LEATHER – nothing conducive to Bruno Kreitman’s well-being, not that he ever enjoyed any