Absolute Beginners by Colin MacInnes Read Free Book Online

guessed this, because she popped out of her parlour again, and caught me with the front door open, and grabbed my sleeve. ‘I must speak to you, son,’ she said.
    ‘Speak to me outside, then,’ I told her, trying to walk out of the door into the street, but she still clutched.
    ‘No, in my room, it’s vital,’ she kept hissing.
    Well, there we were, practically wrestling on the doorway, when she let go and said, ‘ Please come in.’
    I closed the door, but wouldn’t move further than the corridor, and waited.
    ‘Your father’s dying,’ Mum told me now.
    Now, my first thought was, she’s lying; and my second thought was, even if not, she’s trying to get at me, because what does she care if he lives or dies? She’s going to try to make me responsible in some way for something I’m not at all, i.e. the old blackmail of the parents and all oldies against the kiddos.
    But I was wrong, it wasn’t that, she wanted something from me. After a great deal of a lot of beating about the bush, she said to me, ‘If anything should happen to your father, I’d want you to come back here.’
    ‘You’d want me to,’ I said. That’s all.
    ‘Yes. I’d want you to come back here.’
    ‘And why?’
    Because I really didn’t know. But what gave me the clue was Mum dropping her eyes and looking modest and girlish and bashful, at first I thought for effect, but then I realised it was partly for true, and that for once she just couldn’t help it.
    ‘You want me back,’ I said, ‘because you’ll want a man about the house.’
    She mutely acquiesced, as the women’s weeklies say.
    ‘To keep the dear old place respectable , till you get married once again,’ I continued on.
    Still Ma was mute.
    ‘Because old Vern, your previous product, is such a drip-dry drag that no one would ever take him for the male of the establishment.’
    I got an eye-flash for that, but still no answer, while our thoughts sparred up there in silence in the air, unable to disconnect, because no matter how far you’re cut off from a close relation, cut right off and eternally severed, there always remains a link of memory – I mean Mum knew a whole great deal about me, like nobody else did, and that held us.
    ‘Dad’s very much alive,’ I said. ‘He doesn’t look like dying to me a bit. Not a bit, he doesn’t.’
    ‘Yes, but I tell you, the doctor’s told me …’
    ‘I’ll take my instructions in that matter from Dad, and Dad alone,’ I said. ‘And if Dad ever dies, I’ll take my instructions from myself.’
    She could see that was that, and didn’t give me, as you might have expected, a dirty look, but a puzzled one she couldn’t control, such as she’s given me about six times in my life, as though to say to me, what is this monster I’ve created?
    With which I blew.
    Down by the river, where I went to get a breather, I stood beside the big new high blocks of glass-built flats, like an X-ray of a stack of buildings with their skins peeled off, and watched the traffic floating down the Thames below them, very slow and sure (chug, chug) and oily, underneath the electric railway bridge (rattle, rattle), and past the power station like a super-cinema with funnels stuck on it. Peace, perfect peace, though very murky, I decided. Hoot, hoot to you, big barge, bon, bon voyage. There was a merry scream, and I turned about and watched the juveniles, teenagers in bud as you might call them, wearing their little jeans and jumpers, playing in their kiddipark of Disneyland items erected by the borough council to help them straighten out their thwarted egos. When crash! Someone thumped me very painfully on the shoulder blades.
    I very slowly turned and saw the pasty, scabies-ridden countenance of Edward the Ted.
    ‘Bang, bang,’ I said, humouring the imbecile by pointing my thumb and finger at him like a pistol. ‘Bad boy!’
    Ed the Ted said nothing, just looked sinister, and stood breathing halitosis on me.
    ‘And what,’ I said,