Living As a Moon by Owen Marshall Read Free Book Online

smoothed away, they took glasses of chardonnay outside to the patio, and sat there in the glow of solar lamps Freya had placed on the garden edge. The night was quiet: easy laughter could be heard from the house two over where students flatted.
    ‘We shouldn’t blame ourselves,’ Freya said.
    ‘No.’
    ‘And if we’re both in the same city he shouldn’t miss out on much at all. Some kids’ parents are working just about all the time anyway.’
    ‘Can we manage things without the bloody lawyers?’ asked Gavin. ‘At least at the beginning, I mean, until we see how it goes. The whole world doesn’t have to know, does it.’
    ‘I’m okay with that,’ she said.
    She was sitting forward in the wooden chair, her arms resting on her knees and her hands clasped. He could see the shimmer of tears on her cheek, but knew there was no response that offered solution. The distanced laughter of the students drifted in the dark air. ‘Actually I’m pooped,’ she said.
    ‘Yeah, it’s been all go.’
    ‘You think he had a great time, though?’
    ‘He’s a lucky kid,’ said Gavin.
    ‘It’s important we see a lot of each other while he gets used to us being in separate places,’ she said. ‘Nothing abrupt at all, don’t you think?’
    ‘Absolutely,’ said Gavin.

SEGUE DREAMS
    ‘I REMEMBER NOTHING THAT HAPPENED WORTH RELATING THIS DAY. HOW MANY SUCH DAYS DOES MORTAL MAN PASS?’
    Diary of James Boswell, Thursday, 21 July 1763
     
    ‘Would you like to make love?’ Graeme asks his wife.
    ‘No,’ she says, and goes into the bathroom for her shower. Where the bedroom curtains don’t quite meet he can see a strip of sky, and it’s all cloud. He enquires loudly if his wife expects a busy day, but there’s no reply: not because she is out of sorts at all, but because the plumbing is particularly sonorous when the shower mixer indicator is at that one point of the 360 which delivers water at the desired temperature.
    An inconsequential dream is fading; something about mountaineering and the crevasse death of a fat boy who bullied him in Standard One, and whom he hasn’t given a conscious thought in forty years. He remembers now how the mud used to cake on the bully’s big knees in the winter playground, and how his pink gums showed when he sneered. When Graeme pulls the curtains he sees from his neighbour’s dogwood tree that the wind is southerly and therefore cold.
    ‘So, you’ve got a busy day?’ he asks his wife at breakfast.
    ‘Absolutely flat out,’ she says. ‘And then there’s the meeting tonight to organise the thingy.’ His wife is a school dental nurse, and the thingy is a conference on fluoridation. ‘How about you?’ she says. He could tell her that the futility of his existence gapes before him, that he was bullied in Standard One by a fat boy, that the lustre of the world is now quite worn away.
    ‘The Mycenaean kingdoms at eleven, Ionian cities at three,’ he says. They are lectures he has given many times, and he feels a twinge of guilt that yet again he hasn’t got around to updating them. The Ionian lecture, in particular: there is new material on the influence of the Persian satraps which needs to be included.
    ‘Would you mind going round to that Powys street address sometime today? I won’t have a chance,’ his wife says.
    ‘What address?’ he asks.
    ‘Where they advertised the used bricks. I told you we should consider them for the barbecue surround.’
    ‘Ah.’
    ‘Don’t make a decision on the spot. Just see what condition they’re in, and if there’s still mortar sticking to them.’
    There is time after his wife has left for work and before he must leave for the university, for him to get some of the satrap material into the computer, but he doesn’t do it. Without a conscious decision he makes a cup of coffee instead, and reads the newspaper. There is a story about a Nigerian faith healer who made a woman parade around him naked while he sprinkled her with camel