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

familiar was the word for it. Not miraculous.
    Nevertheless, she had no real cause for complaint.
    Insomnia would be worse.
    Any number of things would be worse.
    So she should take advantage of her current situation.
    Dorothy’s next stage in life, as many magazines and also human people told her, would involve increasingly extreme possibilities. Either she would be eaten by some irreversible dream and disappear, or else she would tackle older and older age – frayed bones, cascading dysfunctions – sustained by less and less unconsciousness. The old did not sleep, apparently. She would start to be up and about after three or two or fewer hours of respite from activity, outrunning the sun and desperate to knit, or bake, or to shout at lawn-digging squirrels until trespassing children dared her to summon up the deeper kinds of wrath. Leastways, these were the occupations of the elderly when Dorothy had been a long-dozing, shouted-at child. And there was sitting, of course. Sitting formed a tremendous focus for the waning and silvered, it once was their chief endeavour. It had been sort of heroic, the way old people sat. But as magazines and also human people told her, the current generation of over-sixties were mainly occupied with Internet shopping, exotic holidays, divorce and unprotected sex, perhaps in that order, perhaps not. This seemed a step forward, if not exactly up.
    She wasn’t sure she’d have the energy for all of that by then. Maybe not at the moment, either.
    And low-income sexagenarians were probably sitting as usual, sitting as hard as ever, sitting and slumping and folding gradually towards the waiting horizontal, no sponsored sky-dives for them, no still-warm car keys chucked on the drawing-room table in hopes of a racy afternoon with widowers and widows.
    Dorothy was taking a non-racy and non-exotic holiday. She’d needed a break and had made a point of letting sleep keep her late this initial morning, which meant that she’d missed whatever the hotel described as breakfast. This didn’t upset her. She’d woken in enjoyably slow stages at the soft close of a somehow wearying night, showered and then eaten the banana left over from yesterday’s travel before she stepped out for a potter in the town. A banana would do her fine until lunchtime. Tennis players and athletes in general ate them for potassium with positive effects at a cellular level.
    She recalled a school chemistry lesson in which her teacher – Mr Collins, who sported an unfortunate type of ailing Chinese emperor’s beard – had dropped a sliver of potassium into water. The whole class had then watched as the metal wasped back and forth on the liquid’s surface in a tiny blur of lilac flames, too angry to sink. It made Dorothy smile, then and today: the idea that every human body hid a pastel shade of outrage no one should view without safety glasses, or else protective screens. It was a necessary element. Inside. The fuel for frenzy, beauty, frenzy, for evaporating types of heat was medically essential.
    She breathed in sweetish, Middle Europeanish air – a sense of distant mountains about it and of overpriced market-place snacks closer at hand. The lane around her was either medieval, or a convincing reconstruction of bombed-flat houses, which had restored smoothed lintels, stooping doorways and colourful shutters, ornately impractical locks. What would once have been flammable and squalid accommodation, if not rubble heaps, had been turned into something charming – slightly too self-conscious and with ground floors mainly dedicated to the sale of alarming artisan ceramics, but cute. Relatively cute.
    Dorothy padded along in her holiday shoes, feeling uncluttered and free from the need of garish mugs. Or lace, there was also lace. And contagious-looking biscuits. She believed it had been a good move on her part to avoid the dull, muzzy bustle around the hotel’s buffet