Life: An Exploded Diagram by Mal Peet Read Free Book Online Page B

expectun you. You give me a shock.”
    She’d planned things for his return. A sign on the gate saying, WELCOME HOME GEORGE. A strip wash at the sink, then a touch of makeup and her better set of underwear. Clem in his Sunday clothes. A bottle of beer or two. She’d been more or less promised a half shoulder of pork. And he’d mucked it all up.
    She wiped her face on her sleeve.
    “It’s just we hent got nothun in for tea. Our rations all run out yesterdy, and we can’t get nothun till tomorrer. All we’re got is two eggs and the last of the bread. What mother’ll say when she get home I can’t imagine.”
    “Don’t worry yourself. Look here.”
    From the bag he produced two shiny canisters, unlabeled two-pound tins.
    “One’s Spam; t’other’s corned beef. I can’t rightly say which is which.”
    Later, Clem turned fretful.
    “Thas all the excitement,” Ruth said untruthfully. “I’ll take him up. Say night-night to yer dad, Clem.”
    The boy clung to her and tried to hide his face in her shoulder. George wondered if he should kiss the child’s head; while he hesitated, Ruth turned away toward the stairs.
    “Good night, Clem,” he said cheerily. “Sweet dreams.”
    Left alone, George made a recce of the home he’d never lived in. Thorn Cottage was smaller and darker than he’d remembered. It was permeated by the heavy, sweetish fumes from the sinister-looking paraffin heater that stood in the hall. The kitchen, like the rest of the downstairs rooms, had electricity, but the cooking was still done on a black cast-iron range built into the brick fireplace. The floor was covered in green linoleum, worn so thin that it seemed no more than a cracked coat of paint over the slate slabs beneath.
    The front room — the “best room”— was a grim and crowded museum of Victorian furniture. A framed photograph of a young woman and a soldier stood on a heavy sideboard next to a threadbare stuffed squirrel inside a glass dome.
    The parlor had only two armchairs, one on either side of the hearth. On each sat a ball of wool transfixed by knitting needles.
    It seemed to George that every mark in the place — every scar on the skirting boards, every nick and chip in the stair treads, every dent in the dull brass doorknobs — was a trace of dead people he had never known and wouldn’t have wanted to. Dim presences to whom he had no connection. Who frightened him. This place was old and poor. It was not the bright new world he had been told he was fighting for. He had come home to the past, a past that wasn’t even his own. He felt, suddenly, panicky and claustrophobic.
    He went out into the back garden. The colder air went to his bladder, and he pushed open the outhouse door. It clattered against an obstacle, a galvanized metal bath hung on a hook. A speckled spider had spread her net within it. Relieving himself, he noted that the bog roll was newspaper scissored neatly into rectangles the size of ten-shilling notes and hung on a nail.
    He went to the end of the garden and surveyed his new and awful domain. The hedge had grown wild. Things he presumed were edible protruded from weeds. A fork with a broken handle angled into black soil. Two rusted upturned buckets.
    He lit a cigarette. The last of the sun slanted onto the roof. The thatch was ragged and greened by moss; below and to the left of the half-ruined chimney, a sheet of corrugated iron had been slid in to slow a leak.
    He pulled on the ciggie and straightened himself.
    Discipline. Drill.
    “Men all present and correct, Sarn’t?”
    “Yes, sir.”
    “Ready to kick the shit out of Jerry, Sarn’t?”
    “Yes, sir.”
    “Excellent. Carry on.”
    Men in burned-out tanks who’d come apart like overcooked chickens when you tried to pull them out. You threw up and then you dealt with it.
    “Burial detail! Over here!”
    They’d fought — he’d fought — for sex. To capture the brothels of Benghazi and Tripoli from the Italians, the Germans. Then