You Don't Have To Be Evil To Work Here, But It Helps Read Online Free

down. You could tell it was autumn by the small drift of yellow leaves nestling round the foot of the massive tree that grew in the exact centre of the room.
    ‘When’s dinner?’ he asked.
    ‘Don’t know,’ Mum replied, eyes glued to print. ‘What d’you want?’
    ‘What is there?’
    She thought for a moment. ‘Fish fingers,’ she said. ‘Or chicken kievs. You could open a tin for Gretchen while you’re out there.’
    ‘Mphm.’ Colin nodded, and set course for the kitchen. For Gretchen the cat he opened a can of chicken fillets in gravy. He made himself cheese on toast. The ad hoc catering implied that Dad was having something on a tray in his study; figures to pore over, books to fiddle, whatever. Just as well; Colin didn’t feel like an evening of painfully synthesised conversation in front of the muted telly.
    Then to bed. He’d got the latest John Grisham from the library a day or so back, but for once the poet’s magic was failing to enthral him. He read the same paragraph three times, stuck a Switch receipt in it for a bookmark and laid it by. He wasn’t sleepy but he turned out the light anyway and closed his eyes. Lying in the dark, he fancied he could hear voices - not a Joan of Arc moment necessarily, because Dad’s study-was in the loft conversion directly overhead, and one of the voices could well be the old man’s rumbling growl. The other one sounded feminine, but he couldn’t make out any more than that. The nice-looking female, he thought, and then his stream of consciousness flowed out into the delta of drowsiness. He fell asleep, and so presumably what followed was a dream.
    There was this girl, for a start. Annoyingly, Colin couldn’t see her face - either it was turned away from him or masked from view by the stupid great big hat she was wearing for some reason - but apparently he knew who she was; in fact, as far as he could make out, he was in love with her and (yes, definitely a dream, although somehow it felt more like a memory) she was in love with him. They were strolling beside a river, up and down which young men in straw hats were propelling ditzy-looking boats by means of long, wet sticks. He wished that his dream-viewpoint allowed him to get a good look at the clothes he was wearing, because he had a feeling they were strange and old-fashioned, like the clobber the girl had on. Curious; he had to flounder about in the very back of his subconscious mind before he realised that it was straight out of Mary Poppins, a film he’d slept through once many years ago. If the mental pictures he was creating for himself had been refluxed through the hiatus hernia of memory, it was an intriguing comment on his jackdaw mind.
    Minutiae of female costume had never interested him in the least; but he was prepared to bet good money that the outfit the girl was wearing was historically accurate down to the last frill and button (although when the historical period thus faithfully recreated was, he had no idea). Not, of course, that it really mattered. The unusual and arresting feature of this dream, surely, was the girl who actually liked him back, in spite of having known him for more than ten minutes.
    It got better. He couldn’t see her face, of course, so maybe she looked like a springer spaniel under all that hat, but she had a lovely voice and a wonderful sense of humour - she hadn’t said anything funny yet, but apparently that was part of the backstory -and it was obvious that just being in her company was the most wonderful thing ever. Here was a girl you could talk to all day and never realise how the time was passing, a girl who saw the world in a wonderfully refreshing different way, a girl he was enchanted by and absolutely at home with at the same time— Fine, it was just a dream, and even at its best real life isn’t ever like that (and if it was, ten minutes of it’d be enough to make you want to throw up). Nevertheless, it wasn’t at all like his usual kind of dream.