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

thesis on the rise of equestrian political influence in Rome during the second century BC.
    Lemms is a toiler who twenty years ago would not have been given the opportunity for a doctorate: a glum, uninspired and prodigiously determined young man, with hair like dry pine needles, and sprouting ears that threaten to ramify. Graeme knows the future for Lemms and others of his increasing tribe — a rotation of lesser, untenured academic appointments and the final bitterness of expectation unfulfilled. In the present, however, Lemms scratches in his dry hair and looks about Graeme’s room with a stolid avarice. His glumness is a contagion, and Graeme feels its emanation.
    The afternoon lecture is poorly attended, perhaps because no assignment is due, and there is a flickering fluorescent light close to the lectern, which is unpleasant. Also Graeme has no PowerPoint display to bolster his unrevised Ionian notes, and a commonplace boredom drifts in the still room. He is aware of the lack of animation in his voice, but cannot manage even spurious enthusiasm. No one waits to ask anything of him concerning Cyrus the Emperor, or the city of Miletus, and a tall, young guy leaving with others slaps his open hand to his temple in what Graeme takes to be mockery of the time spent in the lecture.
    As he drives home Graeme remembers the advertisement for used bricks, and finds it in his case. Powys Street is in the older part of the city, and Number 189 is a weatherboard house, but despite that there is indeed a large dump of bricks on the tufted front lawn. No one answers his knock at the front door and then the back, so he goes to the brick heap and makes an appraisal. Most of them seem to be damaged in some way, and most have an icing of mortar. Graeme scrapes one brick against another to check the grip of the mortar, and judges it difficult to remove. He then stands for a moment, a brick in each hand, in the grass of a stranger’s unkempt section and wonders what he’s doing there. No one comes, no neighbours are to be seen.
    Where have they come from, these used bricks piled outside a wooden house? What disintegration of dreams do they represent? Who owns them, yet doesn’t bother to be there for a customer? Why on earth would he and his wife wish to corral their barbecue trolley with old bricks? When does the world end?
    He’s about to leave when a small and battered car pulls into the unsealed drive. A woman gets out, waves and then ducks back into the car to retrieve a bag of groceries. A tall, rather gaunt woman wearing tracksuit trousers with a yellow stripe, and what looks like a man’s corduroy jacket. ‘The ad for the bricks,’ says Graeme, in explanation, and gestures towards them.
    ‘Come inside, come inside,’ she says boisterously, and leads the way through the front door with hardly a pause.
    Down the burrow of a narrow hall they go, and into an old-fashioned kitchen with a table in the middle. The woman dumps the groceries on it, and whirls disconcertingly towards him with a hand outstretched. ‘Sally,’ she says. ‘Some call me Sally Army,’ she adds with a barking laugh.
    ‘Graeme,’ he says, and is surprised by the strength of Sally’s grip. ‘I was just having a look at the bricks, but I don’t think they’re quite what I’m after.’ He feels he’s inside the house, has been greeted with familiarity, on false pretences. ‘Sorry.’
    ‘They belong to the former tenants. The landlord said if they hadn’t collected them by last week, I could sell them off. They’re a bit of an eyesore, aren’t they.’
    Sally Army looks like a man. She has a lined face of character, without make-up and with bristling eyebrows. Her hair is long, grey, parted tautly in the middle and held at the back by a blue band. ‘Forget the bricks then, and give me an honest opinion,’ she says.
    ‘Pardon.’
    ‘I’ve just been down to the gallery to see the curator about my exhibition there. Forty-two pieces and only