If Nobody Speaks of Remarkable Things by Jon McGregor Read Free Book Online Page A

just lay there looking at the certificate, looking at the official type, the formal words, looking at their names laid down in sloping black ink.
    And she’d whispered it’s a good story isn’t it?, unbuttoning his shirt, spreading her fingers out across his chest as though smoothing wrinkles from a bedsheet, and he’d saidyes, yes it is, it’s a good story. And the last thing she’d said to him, just before she went to sleep that night, quietly, almost as though she thought he was asleep, she said you will come back won’t you, you will keep safe, please, you will come home?

Chapter 7
    When I got back from that first appointment it rained for a day and a half.
    It woke me up in the middle of the night, a quiet noise at first, burbling across the roof, spattering through the leaves of the trees, and it was good to lie there for a while and listen to it.
    But later, when I got up, it was heavier and faster, pouring streaks down the windows, exploding into ricochets on the pavement outside.
    I stood by the window watching people in the street struggle with umbrellas.
    I phoned work and said I can’t come in I’m sick.
    I thought about what my mother would say if she saw me skiving like this, I remembered what she said when I was a child and stuck indoors over rainy weekends.
    There’s no use mooching and moping about it she’d say, it’s just the way things are.
    Why don’t you play a game she’d say, clapping her hands as if to snap me out of it.
    And I’d ask her to point out all the one-player games and she’d tut and leave the room.
    I wonder if that’s what she’ll say when I finally tell her, that it’s the way things are, that there’s no use mooching and moping about it.
    It doesn’t seem entirely unlikely.
    She used to lecture me about it, about taking what you’re given and making the most of it.
    Look at me with your dad she’d say, gesturing at him, and I could never tell if she was joking or not.
    But it’s how she was, she would always find a plan B ifthings didn’t go straight, she would always find a way to keep busy.
    If it was raining, and she couldn’t hang the washing out, she would kneel over the bath and wring it all through, savagely, until it was dry enough to be folded and put away.
    If money was short, which was rare, she would march to the job centre and demand an evening position of quality and standing.
    That was what she said, quality and standing, and when they offered her a cleaning job or a shift at the meatpackers she would take it and be grateful.
    She always said that, she said you should take it and be grateful.
    And so I tried to follow her example that day, hemmed in by the rain, I sat at the table and read all the information they gave me at the clinic.
    I tried to take in all the advice in the leaflets, the dietary suggestions, the lifestyle recommendations, the discussions of various options and alternatives.
    I read it all very carefully, trying to make sure I understood, making a separate note of the useful telephone numbers.
    I even got out a highlighter pen and started marking out sections of particular interest, I thought it was something my mother might approve of.
    But it was difficult to absorb much of the information, any of the information, I kept looking through the window and I felt like a sponge left out in the rain, waterlogged, useless.
    I was distracted by the pictures, by all these people looking radiant and cheerful, smartly dressed and relaxed.
    I knew I didn’t look like that, I knew I didn’t feel relaxed or cheerful.
    I didn’t feel able to accept what my body was doing to me, and I still don’t.
    It felt like a betrayal, and it still does.
    And I kept trying to tell myself to calm down.
    To tell myself that this is not something out of the ordinary, this is something that happens.
    This is not an unbearable disaster, a thing to be bravely soldiered through.
    It’s something that happens.
    But I think I need somebody to say these