All the Rage by A. L Kennedy Read Free Book Online Page A

serpent and, that so long time afterwards, Mary wasn’t. And plainly the snake is, more properly, the bad maleness of man, the writhing soft-hard wickedness he carries ahead of him into his life, the heat he goes astray with. Mary stamps on it.
Bad boy
and she stamps it flat.
    She reminds the more thoughtful, the put-away boys, that the beast was only cursed to go on its belly after it gave man and woman the knowledge of how they were shaped to fit each other sweetly and, furthermore, shaped for wide, mad catalogues of other pleasure. This meant that, before the curse, there were legs maybe, legs and arms and elbows maybe, the presence of some other, unrecorded man in Eden maybe, one who knew what he was all about and who spread the word and then was reduced to his essence in animal form: side-winding lust with a tongue in flickers and hard eyes.
    Doug flinched somewhere at the sharp idea of it. He was quite sensitive, Doug.
    I MADE YOU AND HELL MEND YOU
.
    Which was hardly fair.
    DID I SAY IT WOULD BE
?
    And now another tune washed over him from childhood and shook loose something, nothing, some emptiness that wanted to be filled with apples and angels and promises and releases from sacrifice.
    This was customary; you wanted it in a Christmas service: an opportunity to weep.
    Douglas, or whoever, shivered and the snag and heave and braveness in his breath surprised him. Wipe at the eyes when he sat and no shame about it.
    Before this lifting up of prayers started, the guy with the lectern, quiet and sincere, deliberately named the anxious and lonely and fearful and so forth.
    He took pains to make his audience aware of them.
    He was beseeching.
    His audience was beseeching.
    Douglas was beseeching with them, he couldn’t avoid it, and was hurt beneath his ribs from the effort, the wholesale striving for others’ sake.
    No thoughtful child, no watching mind, could say they didn’t care or hadn’t asked, considered feasible improvements.
    And then here is the final carol coming, designed as a crescendo, the triumph of being born as solid in the music as the triumph of refusing to be dead – lower harmonies thrumming in the floor, as if hell is dancing and not so bad, nowhere and nothing so bad as the man who isn’t Douglas, as the put-away boy, might have thought and he doesn’t believe, is not a believer, doesn’t seek to be pure, or righteous, or mingled with forever, tasting it. He is simply crying and unable, for heaven’s sake, to cry any less or prevent small howling bubbles of sound from escaping him and there is no justification for his behaviour, he is not especially mourning or damaged and this is exactly his problem, to be frank, because he deserves no particular sympathy. All that has happened is that time has passed and he isn’t who he was and never will be and occurrences have hurt him
tump tump
and so he weeps and he would like a rest and so he weeps and this boy, this man beseeches an intervention, but has no faith in saviours and so he weeps and he knows he is commonplace and unrequited and so he weeps and he knows he is impossible and built around these small pieces, baffling pieces, ridiculous animal pieces, and so he weeps and he knows that he needs to be saved and he sings for it, tries to sing for it.
    Everyone, he thinks, does try to sing for it.
    His problem would be that he’s making the wrong noise.

The Practice of Mercy
    DOROTHY USED TO dream in wonders, but that happened not so often now. Apart from the usual, there was no joy in pulling back a quilt and fitting herself snug to a sheet for that first touch of rest. She appreciated what was there: the cool cloth above and below and an inrush of what was gentle, was purely easing, but her nights remained unillustrated: sleep was simply fast, it seemed, and getting faster, no more than that. It would find her and immediately open itself in the manner of a soft but determined, familiar mouth. Yes,