Living As a Moon by Owen Marshall Read Free Book Online Page A

urine and recited incantations to increase her chances of receiving immigration papers for England. Female nakedness is always newsworthy: nothing else in the story is of the slightest concern. Prurience has taken a trivial incident from African obscurity and placed it on the breakfast table of the world.
    Cicero, a terrier with hair like the bristles of a worn toothbrush, whines behind the door. He is let in and impatiently waits to be fed from the Doggie Woggie Giant Roll with heart and kidneys. Graeme talks to him, draws fingers through his sparse coat, but Cicero has become self-absorbed and depressed with age. No longer does he display disinterested affection, bring in the paper or hold up his paw in a greeting. Only his appetite and body odour are undiminished. Domesticity and abject loyalty have palled for Cicero, and his joints grown stiff. ‘Good fellow, aren’t you, yes,’ says Graeme, ‘and you like that Woggie Woggie don’t you just, old fellow. Yes, you do.’ Cicero says nothing.
    Graeme has a glimpse of the red-jacketed postie passing, and stops talking to his dog to concentrate on a new distraction. Letters and emails are moments of possibility in his day. The air is cold on his bald head as he walks to the gate, and the daisies on the lawn, rather than having a wildflower allure, remind him of yet another duty. Yet, there is a good handful of mail, and he resists the inclination to check it out until he’s back in the house, seated by the window and upwind from Cicero.
    All, however, is winnowed away without leaving solid grain or gain. The rates demand, the 134th issue of the Ancient History Review , a credit card statement, a slip announcing the milk round has changed hands, with apostrophes twice missing from abbreviated it’s, a note from a former colleague, now in the States, saying she has married an evangelical preacher from Alabama, seven multicoloured advertising circulars, and a donation envelope from the support group for those with clinical flatulence. What more did he expect? But he did, of course — he yearned for a gift unsolicited and undeserved, a lightning strike that would galvanise his world. ‘Cicero, old boy,’ Graeme says, ‘I cannot believe the earth is not flat.’ Cicero doesn’t bother to reply.
    His eleven o’clock lecture is in Room C25. It’s a long time since Graeme has visited Mycenae, Tiryns and Pylos, and years of reading and conferences have dulled that bright immediacy. He makes an effort with the PowerPoint display of the burial treasures, but the majority of students are impassive. Yet the lecture is well attended and a good many students stay after its conclusion. The reason for both occurrences is soon disclosed: the third assignment is almost due and half the class want extensions. The applications are more statements of entitlement than requests for clemency. He listens to their trite justifications and allows all their requests from weariness rather than goodwill.
    In the staff club he lunches with Brendon Connor of Linguistics and a visiting Fellow from East Anglia who is an expert on the economic consequences of war. They talk of rugby, the naked African woman and the loss of savouries since the new caterers took over. ‘I used to have curry wontons two or three times a week,’ laments Brendon.
    ‘Not even a sausage roll now. Jesus. It’s not right. Who makes these decisions on our behalf is what I want to know,’ says the East Anglian Fellow. Graeme thinks he may say something about the demise of pinwheel pastries with bacon and corn, but instead gazes at the full cloud cover clamped over all the campus. Everything seems on a small scale, and shrinking further.
    In his room, J47 on level four of the Humanities Block, he works on a departmental submission to the university library, which has decided to reduce its subscriptions to academic journals on classical antiquity, then has a session as supervisor with Carl Lemms, who is preparing a PhD