Hand Me Down World by Lloyd Jones Read Free Book Online Page B

her up to the last street light. There, as we shake hands, I see what appears to be clothing and something else, something in her bag that glints once and disappears as she moves off. Something which frankly gives me a chill. I turn and walk back to the car. For a few minutes I sit behind the wheel. I watch her in that cold blue coat rise up to the shoulder of the road. I study her outline against that part of the sky, that plastic bag at her side, those thin legs. Her head turns. Several vehicles flash by. Then it is all dark. And she has gone. I stay there another ten minutes. I half expect to see her. I don’t know why. But I do. I stay by the car until the skies lighten. Now I’m worried that my wife will wake and find me gone. Or else Gina will be up watering her balcony plants when her good-for-nothing Croat son-in-law drives into her garage. They will want to know where I was. When I play back the truth it hardly sounds believable. They will think there is more to it. That’s when I decide to drive on to the police station. It’s the only way I can make sense of or justify what I just did. For the sake of persuading Gina and my wife I will need the police on-side. At the station the night-watch is just about to go home when I appear in the door. He invites me to take a chair by his desk and he takes down everything. The hardest questions come later—from my wife. She wants to know what it was about the woman that aroused my suspicions. After all, she wasn’t doing anything. She just happened to be up at a very late hour without a roof over her head. The first and second night she was asleep. The third night she sat there as if she half expected a bus to roll up. Now this is the only thing I made up. I told my wife she was crying. That the black woman was crying. Suddenly it all made sense to her, and without that detail none of what I did or why I did what I did makes sense. A week later a policeman rang me. He asked me to come to the station at my own convenience. He had some photographs he wished to show me.

seven
    The alpine hunter and guide
    The best way to prepare a partridge—you can take this down if you wish. First, a partridge. Preferably shot early morning under low cloud. That way the bird cannot see the approaching shadows. As far as the partridge is concerned the birdshot has arrived out of the hillsides. There has been no time for it to know fear. I have eaten many partridges. I know by their taste which partridge has experienced a moment’s fear and which hasn’t. Adrenalin is the flavour of fear and leaves a distinct taste. Next, you need young chestnuts and garlic. To prepare the partridge—pluck the feathers, salt and rub olive oil into its skin, remove its insides and replace with half-roasted chestnuts and garlic. Peel the garlic, of course. Then stitch up the belly. Or you may use a metal clip. I myself don’t, my shooting colleagues are less fussy, especially at night around a low fire. This next piece of information is important. Slowly turn the partridge over a low flame. We bring with us a special contraption for slow-turning the partridge over the embers. When everyone has finished boasting, and exhausted their memories of past women, the partridge is ready to be eaten with rough bread, cous cous and a bottle of chianti.
    Now to the day in question. We had driven up the day before. Me, Paolo, Leo and Tom, an American food writer who had moved a month ago to our village with his wife, Hester. Hester? No. Sorry, Cynthia. Cynthia. Paolo, Tom, Leo, myself. Tom has come along with our shooting party to experience for himself the beginning and the end of the partridge recipe.
    We camp where we usually do, in an abandoned shepherd’s hut. Goats used to have the run of the hills. There aren’t so many any more. A few wild ones. From the hut we fan out with the dogs and walk through the brush to the foothills and back again. You know what a colander