Last Orders by Graham Swift Read Free Book Online Page B

she's slept in since she was six years old.
    She said, 'He's looking for his roots.'
    Carol said, 'What are they when they're at home?'
    She said, 'His ancestors, his origins. He wants to trace his family, he wants to go to where they came from. A lot of them do it, if they're over here for a bit.'
    All looking for their roots.
    And it was a handy thing that his lot started out from some village at the far end of Somerset, because that way it made a neat holiday, it made a neat little jaunt to the West Country. They could take in Stonehenge, Salisbury Cathedral, Cheddar Gorge, and all those other sights an Aussie over here might care to see. With a tent and an old Ford Anglia he'd cadged off a mate. It was a handy thing that it was summer, her first summer in college, and times were changing, long hair, short skirts and short odds. Don't tell me that wasn't why he was here in the first place, origins my arse, and I don't suppose it would have mattered if they'd never found Little Dunghole, or whatever it was called, so long as they found a few fields of long grass to roll around in together.
    We'd never have said yes if it wasn't for his bleeding roots.
    But you had to give permission on account of it was the permissive age, never mind what your own folks might have said, your own ancestors.
    Can't all have it all, can we, Ray boy? Gee-up! I see Daisy Dixon's getting spliced.
    But when they were gone I wished them well. I wished I was them. I thought of them travelling across England. Hampshire, Wiltshire, Somerset, over the hills and far away. I pictured them putting up their tent and curling up together with the smell of grass and only a thin fold of fabric between them and the night. I could tell you some things, girl, about camping out under the stars, desert nights'd freeze your bollocks off. And, whether they ever did or not, I couldn't help imagining them finding some tucked-away churchyard, green and quiet, and looking at the names on the gravestones.
    It took a war to make me travel, to make me see the world, if that's what you could call it. But there was him having hopped all the way from Sydney to Somerset, and there was her sharing the journey with him, out on the road, and there was me, still living in Bermondsey, still sitting on the old man's yard to keep Charlie Dixon happy. The boozer, the betting shop, the bus to Blackfriars. And in over fifteen years I hadn't taken Carol anywhere.
    I said, 'What's the betting that car packs up on them?'
    She said, 'What's the betting she conies back pregnant?'
    Her face was all fixed and hard, like it would be all my fault, all my doing because it wasn't her who ever said yes in the first place.
    Yes, you two, why don't you just go and run off together?
    I don't know which came first: whether it was her daughter growing up and having a whole lot of things she never had that made her act like a woman who'd made a wrong choice, or whether she'd been thinking that, anyway, for years, but shoved it to the back of her mind for the sake of bringing up Sue. She was forty years old, knocking forty-one. She hadn't wanted another kid, one was plenty Sometimes I'd think she'd never wanted Sue. Susie was for me. Sometimes I'd think, It aint a fair world, when you think of Amy.
    She said, 'So what's the betting, Lucky Johnson? Why don't you put your money on that?'
    She takes another gulp of coffee and there's still that pucker in her forehead, and I think, If she hasn't got one in the oven then what's the problem and why's she having so much trouble finding words? Then it's as though I kick myself inside, a big kick, so I almost give a jolt right there on the bed, because I see what's coming, plain as day, and I should have seen it coming long before, more fool me, and I think she sees that I see it, because it's then that she starts in, as if I've given her the all-clear. She flashes those brown eyes she knows how to flash and says, 'Dad.'
    She says Andy's going back to Sydney in the