A Bit of Earth by Rebecca Smith Read Free Book Online Page A

met the few relatives they could muster.
    But Susannah had resumed her role as family photographer soon after the ‘first trip out’ pictures. First piece of toast, first tooth, first crawl, first steps, first birthday, and so on, and so on. The photographer had been Susannah. Yet another failing on his part. The photos stopped suddenly. And so, Guy realised, had the holidays and the parties and the trips.
    Perhaps Felix was old enough for a camera of his own. Felix would love that. Or, Guy wondered, was he just so lazy that he wanted his son to take all the photos of his own childhood?
    Guy loved it now if some celebrity admitted to bad times.
    â€˜And tell me,’ the interviewer always asked, with a drop in tone to the ultra-empathetic, ‘were there ever times when you considered suicide?’
    â€˜Well, once or twice, in my very darkest hours …’ was the invariable reply.
    â€˜Ha!’ thought Guy. ‘Once or twice! Once or twice a bloody minute, more like.’
    But of course he couldn’t. There was Felix.
    One night, up late, drinking too many cans of beer again, unable to sleep for tiredness, he watched
Once Upon a Time in America.
There was Robert De Niro, all goodness spent, all alone, lying for days on end on a bed, smoking opium, completely lost and oblivious to the world. That’s what I want, thought Guy, a holiday in an opium den, complete oblivion. He fell asleep on the sofa and woke up at 4 a.m., freezing and with a crick in his neck. He shuffled up the stairs, and stood for a while watching Felix breathe. The sky was turning grey. He thought he might just go outside and do a bit of gardening. The realisation that he would look like someone digging a secret grave almost made him smile. He went to bed instead. The next morning he was up again at the usual time, showered, shaved, dressed in the usual clothes, making Felix the usual breakfast. What else could he do?
    Erica Grey knocked very lightly on the frame of the greenhouse door. The paint was peeling into sharp little flakes. Erica’s knuckles were tough and shiny from summers of horse-riding and dry-stone walling, sailing and environmental projects, but she still had to suck a splinter out of her middle finger. Professor Misselthwaite didn’t seem to hear her. He was staring hard out into the botanical garden. She followed his gaze, wanting to know exactly what it was that interested him. The wind was sighing in the bamboo. Two yellow wagtails were dipping at the edge of the stream. She would have loved to rig up a time-lapse video camera to record the growthand collapse of that gunnera. Perhaps now one day she would.
    She knocked lightly again. For some reason he had an old-fashioned, zinc-white alarm clock on the bench beside him. She stepped lightly around the side of the greenhouse and saw that his eyes were closed. He couldn’t really be sleeping, sitting up like that. Erica knew that Professor Misselthwaite’s wife had been killed in an accident. She would not intrude. She walked across the meadow and sat down on a bench to write him a note.
    Dear Professor Misselthwaite,
    I have been told that I have got the funding for my PhD.
    Erica Grey.
    So what was she going to do now? Tiptoe back in, leave the note on the bench, and possibly disturb and embarrass him? She might as well just send him an email and arrange to go and see him some time when he wasn’t so, well, out of it.
    Then the alarm clock went off. Too loudly. Anybody else, or a person in a cartoon, would have jumped a foot, but she saw him reach out slowly and switch it off. He rubbed his eyes and put the clock in his big leather bag, the one he always had at lectures. It was the sort of bag carried by doctors in story books.
    Then he was coming across the meadow towards her. She got up and smiled.
    â€˜Ah, Erica,’ he said, ‘Erica Grey.’
    â€˜The letter came today,’ she said. ‘I got my