A Fool's Alphabet by Sebastian Faulks Read Free Book Online

and indignation, she eventually pieced together what had happened.
    Then she folded him in her arms and laid his head against her shoulder. ‘My little boy,’ she said, ‘my little boy.’ She talked to him and stroked his head until at last he was calm. When he had stopped sobbing and allowed himself to be soothed by his mother’s words of reassurance, he gradually came to see that there was nothing she could do to set right what had gone wrong. She could offer only comfort; she was not, after all, omnipotent.

COLOMBO
SRI LANKA 1980
    PIETRO RUSSELL WAS the only passenger to leave the plane when it stopped at Colombo on its way from Hong Kong to the Middle East. Hong Kong to Colombo is a strange trip to make. A few Chinese businessmen might reluctantly leave the Crown colony and inspect some business project in upcountry Sri Lanka to see if it is worth the investment of a few million dollars. Or some unusually adventurous Sinhalese businessman might be returning after an attempt to raise capital in Hong Kong for a scheme in his native island. But these things are rare, and when Pietro came down the steps of the Boeing 747, there was only him to feel the heavy night air that blew in from the palm trees round the airport.
    It was a luxurious sensation. He was the only man to offer a passport to the smiling immigration clerk, the only man to see his suitcases carried in by the equally smiling porter. There was none of the usual feeling of displacement. There was hardly anyone there at all.
    Pietro wondered how the thin porter could carry his heavy cases outside to the taxi and tipped him an amount which in Hong Kong might have passed for normal but which in Colombo seemed to render the porter speechless. Soon the taxi driver was telling him how the Sri Lankan cricket team was as good as any in the world. He drove a Morris Oxford in a high gear in the middle of the road, turning round frequently to emphasise his claims for the skill of Gehan Mendis or Ravi Ratnayake. He used the horn to move the night-time bicyclists and bullock carts, but never touched thebrakes. His style of driving, one-geared, one-paced, was like that of a New York cab driver on Fifth Avenue when he gets a good run of lights late at night, though his conversation, not being a paranoid creole from behind bulletproof glass, was more enjoyable.
    The night was exotically warm. The air was soft, though occasionally there would come a blast like that from an air extractor in the kitchen of an Indian restaurant. Pietro lay back against the seat, unable to help out further on the problem of the island’s shortage of quick bowlers. He watched the palm trees and wooden roadside shacks trail out behind them.
    He had booked a hotel on the south side of town that had been recommended to him as cheap but reliably clean. The rooms were ranged round a courtyard in the middle of which was an elderly swimming pool. A soft-footed room-boy in an orange tunic carried his cases into a large, bare room in which an air-conditioning unit rumbled against the wall. The light was dim and the furniture old. The floors were tiled. No rumour of corporate chain identity, of plastic-sealed lavatory seats or built-in radios had penetrated the hotel. A mosquito coil sat on the windowsill waiting for a match.
    The room-boy sat down and stared at Pietro as he unpacked. He asked him about the country he came from, if he was married, and how many brothers and sisters he had. Pietro piled his clothes into a 1950s walnut chest of drawers that might have come from a Bexhill boarding house. When he came back from the bathroom, the room-boy was still sitting on the chair. By now he had stopped talking and seemed to want only to stare at Pietro’s European face and rough mousy hair.
    It was one o’clock in the morning and Pietro wanted to sleep. He gave the boy some money. Unlike the porters in Hong Kong, the boy didn’t at once inspect it, then disappear swiftly in