Goya'S Dog by Damian Tarnopolsky Read Free Book Online Page B

drills were announced. Through his O-shaped window Dacres watched passengers and crew run hither and yon in search of life jackets, life belts, life this, life that, like insects on a burning piece of wood. It got colder and colder as they went north, icy winds battered the empty promenade deck, and even in the Melody Bar the howl was audible. Still, you could always order another drink and just sign for it.
    The Americans were clean and healthy and unconcerned. Dacres had several conversations with an arrogant Boston student, principally in the hopes of getting a few minutes alone with his desperatelyunhappy female friend, a girl with immense eyes and soft blurred lips and nose. When they met, he thought that if she were a poet she would have tossed herself off a Paris bridge, hand-in-hand with a Romanian, by now. She had that sort of face.
    But Rosalie was well-bred and pedestrian and she wanted nothing to do with Dacres. Fundamentally he couldn’t blame her. But her body: it was like glass he wanted to eat. All I would need is a minute, he thought, trying to masturbate in the tiny cabin bunk, straining to harden, and then losing the thought. He was trying to think of Rosalie unbuttoning her skirt, but all he could see was the boyfriend and her, in separate beds, under separate sheets, in their cabin, lamp on, polite, joking about the smelly old goat who was mooning about after her. Unable to concentrate. Flaccid again.
    He’d misread her terribly. Rosalie’s sensitive features obscured a dully straightforward personality. She wasn’t entrancingly bitter: she was just put out to be travelling in tourist. And she fumed, watching him as he talked to her Bradley, and never asked him a single question about himself. Still, they put up with him, somehow, and as he felt utterly alienated from the dancers and painters he was supposed to be getting to know, no matter how Gorren tried to make him mix with them, he spent more and more time with his little couple, over coffee, over photo-magazines. Bradley was unbearable: he had been studying Norwegian agricultural techniques, he kept repeating the word transhumance , and Dacres had long since missed the opportunity to ask what it meant. The boy had a square head and he could talk. As he did, Dacres studied Rosalie’s silk blouse, the armour plating she had on underneath. Why is someone with your looks saddled with this dolt? he asked her, in his head; why are you dull? Then caught a glimpse of himself in the glass: fattened like a winter goose, face blotchy, hair waxy, awkwardly sagging out of his deckchair, his body having lost its tightness, like a balloon from last night’s party. He looked away.
    Gorren had bet him twenty Canadian dollars that he wouldn’t ever even see her in her slip. “She’s all-American,” Gorren told him. “You don’t know the type. She would never consider it. Not even after abarrel of vermouth, not even if it was just the two of you left alone on the planet.” Neither of them knew how much twenty Canadian dollars was, nor had ever had cause to care. Dacres was just glad to have someone to talk to.
    They docked. Quebec City. Montreal. The chambermaid. What became known as the Ottawa binge. And then Toronto.

    After ten days, when his roll of banknotes was getting so he could have folded it into a sardine can, Dacres made a business call. He’d been trying off and on to reach Stanley Burner, but though he’d left several telephone messages, he’d heard nothing. Burner was away or occupied.
    The first time he’d telephoned, Burner’s secretary had taken a message and said he would call back, but Dacres never heard from him. The second time he called she said he was away in Ottawa, but would be in touch just as soon as he returned. Eventually Dacres got on the streetcar to New Toronto (wondering how there could ever have been time to build a new one) and a different secretary he’d