Observatory Mansions by Edward Carey Read Free Book Online Page A

wounds clean, to hide her bones.
    We called her Twenty because she had declined to give her real name. She was, before the new resident of flat eighteen arrived, the Mansions’ most recent resident. She arrived during a storm, a rare day when all the dust in the city was peeled off the walls, off the streets, off the few trees, off the people too, and rushed, in chalky, ashy colours into the darkness of drains.
    During that particular storm Twenty, the Dog Woman, climbed through an open window of one of the unoccupied flats on the ground floor of Observatory Mansions with her ailing dog, a pathetically thin Great Dane, its ribcage piercing through its scarred pelt. In the night, after many hours of sobs and groans, with one final spasm of its back legs, it died. It was a great, black, ugly corpse. It must have been a titan of a dog. A dog, Twenty’s companion, equal to her in size. The pair of them had got caught up in a fight, a dog fight, and running away from that fight the Great Dane had bounded into the roundabout traffic. And was hit. It was thrown from the corner of a car into the brick wall of Observatory Mansions, its hips smashed. And Twenty, more careful of the traffic, rushed over to stroke it during its final breaths and to carry it to our home.
    Twenty buried her husband outside Observatory Mansions the next morning, under the hard, dusty earth where flower beds used to be. She pushed down her knickers and pissed over the grave. Twenty sniffed around the flats and chose flat twenty. Flat twenty, top floor, outside the lift that didn’t work, outside the lift that once worked and once worked so swiftly that it killed Mr Alec Magnitt and shattered Mr Alec Magnitt’s calculator (lot 737). But Twenty knewnone of this. Twenty used the stairs. Out of choice even though there was no other.
    Twenty, Dog Woman, did not pay rent.
    She had no reason to welcome a new resident either. Since the residents of Observatory Mansions were of the human kind, she detested them all. She loved only … dogs.
    And for us Twenty was the perfect resident. She did not pay rent but that was no concern of ours. She kept herself to herself. Spent her days (and most of her nights) in the park.
    That day in the park, I watched her lie down, belly sagging, on the patchy grass of Tearsham Park Gardens. She yawned, she placed her chin on the ground, wagged her bottom, closed her eyes.

A child’s toy .
    That day in the park I saw a child. I saw a mother carrying the child, way above the ground, way above child level, somewhere high up – mummy level. I saw the child’s hand gripped around a child’s toy. A lock of love. The object, before unimportant but then, suddenly, most notable, fell to the ground. The child screamed. The mother walked on, told the child to close its mouth, separated child from child’s toy for ever. I saw that object, once smothered with attention, now abandoned and lonely, another casualty of love.
    So I stood up, approached, stopped, stooped, checked the object for unreasonable dirt, for child’s saliva and snot, for white cotton dirtying substances, for gloves’ enemies. Found none. Found the object most collectable. Found the object alone, childless, in need of a collector. And so, always friend of the friendless and quick as a magpie, I swiped it.
    A child’s toy, rescued from the park’s floor, found a home in my pocket. A small metal Concorde aeroplane, with teeth marks around its cockpit, flaking off the paint, with one of its plastic wheels missing. Where would it fly to? Where was thehangar? There was a little space, more than enough to land in (never to take off again). A plot. Labelled lot number nine hundred and eighty-six.
    I didn’t go picking up every abandoned object, that has to be clear. Requirements must be met. The teeth marks around the cockpit, the missing wheel had given the object some history. Showed that it was loved. Marked it out as relevant.
    So I rushed across the park, dodged