Gazooka by Gwyn Thomas Read Free Book Online Page A

would allow.
    First he dropped into a crouching position on the floor to invoke the image of Cynlais making ready for the start. Tasso leaned over the counter, concerned, and Uncle Edwin had to tell him that Gomer was all right, just acting. Then Gomer jumped erect, with a cruel, arrogant look on his face to imitate Erasmus John. Gomer’s arm was outstretched and his index finger was working violently on an imaginary trigger. He had his hand pointed at the door. Three customers outside peered through the door’s glass panel, saw Gomer, and moved up the street, at speed, thinking that Tasso had now had what for a long time had been coming to him, encouraging such clients as Gomer Gough and Uncle Edwin. Tasso told Uncle Edwin that he thought Gomer had now made his point and would he please point whatever it was he was supposed to have in his hand at some other part of the shop.
    â€˜In their long history, Tasso, the Celts have done some dubious and disastrous bits of running, but this thing today opened up a new path altogether. Erasmus John the Going Gone, that auctioneer who acts as an official at these events, fired his gun. Cynlais flashed into action and for five seconds he went so fast everybody thought he had left by way of Erasmus’ gun. Didn’t he, Edwin?’
    â€˜Fact,’ said Edwin. ‘He seemed to be in flight from all the world’s heartbreak and shame.’
    â€˜Then Caney’s cure struck,’ said Gomer, and you could almost see the rum-and-butter toffee parting in his mouth to make way for the bitterness of his tone. ‘Have you, Tasso, ever seen a man trying to finish a hundred-and-twenty-yard dash on one leg?’
    â€˜Not on one leg. Always in Italy both the legs are used.’
    â€˜It was a terrible sight. Cynlais gave some fine hops, I’ll say that for him. On that form I’d enter him against a team of storks, but against those other boys he was yards behind. And that Erasmus John the Going Gone running alongside and ask ing sarcastically if Cynlais would like the stewards to do some thing about the leg he still had on the ground. I fancied I also saw Erasmus taking a few sly kicks at Cynlais as if he wished to further desolate the parts of the boy’s spirit that hadn’t yet been laid flat by Caney.’
    â€˜ A nd where is he now, the Cynlais?’ asked Tasso.
    â€˜In bed, trying to explain to his kidneys, which are still moving about inside him like jackie jumpers, about Caney, Caney’s wife and her reaction to the gum on the labels that plays such hell with her.’
    â€˜It was Moira Hallam that did it,’ said Uncle Edwin, sounding as angry as a minor key human being ever will. ‘Compared with this business of physical love the Goodwin sands are a meadow. I’d like to make her sorry for the way she flicks acid over the hearts of boys like Cynlais.’
    Gomer seconded this, and Tasso did something to set the urn hissing, which was his way of saying that he was behind the motion too.
    The following night Milton Nicholas came into the Library and Institute and after a short spell of walking about among the bookshelves and thinking hard about the carnivals, went into the small anteroom where Gomer Gough and Teilo Dew the Doom were locked in a game of chess that seemed to have been going on for several winters.
    â€˜I’ve been thinking about Ephraim Humphries the ironmonger,’ said Milton. Gomer Gough and Teilo Dew did not look up or seem surprised. Humphries had for years lived out on a kind of social tundra and his fiats against the pagans of Meadow Prospect were always high on the agenda of the Discussion Group. Ephraim was very comfortably off and he had a great weakness for budgerigars of which he had a front room full. He had three of these birds that could do rough versions of temperance hymns and missionary anthems like ‘Row for the shore, sailor, pull for the shore, Heed not that stranded wreck