Our Picnics in the Sun by Morag Joss Read Free Book Online

fingertips arched on the tabletop, and closed my eyes, afraid that my breathing would give away my whereabouts. I wondered if Adam had read my email yet.
I hope you have told them how much leave you’re owed, it must be weeks and weeks now!
However desperate that sounded to him it was far, far less desperate than I felt.
    I opened my eyes at the sound of Digger scraping his feet over the threshold. I glanced at the sitting room; Howard hadn’t moved and was watching a cartoon now. Digger waited, chewing on a blister he’d got from the sheep clippers and watching me as I bent down to the fridge and brought out cans of beer. He drank one leaning against the sink, set it down empty, wiped his mouth, and said he’d be off. I didn’t try to persuade him to have another. For every one of his unkind remarks there seemed to be another that he turned into a look of disdain instead of speaking aloud, and I couldn’t bear his presence another moment. His contempt for us, the doomed, naïve, arrogant Londoners who thought they could make a go of it on Exmoor, he had once tried to hide; now that he believed he’d been proved right he extended to us—between threats about our tenancy—a kind of snide pity. After he left, all I wanted to do was get in a bath, wash off the whole filthy day, and sleep. Instead I loaded up a tray with Howard’s supper and took it into the sitting room.
    He wasn’t watching the television at all. He was crying. His good hand, the fingers still crooked in the scissor handles, lay shaking in his lap, half-buried under drifts of his silky hair and darker curls from his beard. What was left of the hair on his head fell across his brow and stood up around his ears in chopped tufts, and the remains of his beard looked like torn patches of matting glued to his cheeks. He lifted his face, soaked in tears and sweat and now falling in folds to the papery-white, naked wattle under his chin. His weeping camemore from his mouth than his eyes; his newly exposed lips were pink and quivering and the bottom one was cut and swollen. It struck me that I had never properly seen his mouth—indeed his face—before.
    “For God’s sake, Howard, what have you done? What the hell have you done?” I said. Above the television my voice was hard and flat as if I were testing it for an echo against the walls of an empty room. I turned and switched off the television. And as I often did, I also flicked a switch in my mind. I began to imagine the amusing, valiant email I would try to write to Adam about what was happening, reaching for phrases that would convince him, and thereby myself, that we were coping all right. It was one of the ways I kept going, by summoning quite unreal and sudden surges of spirit and energy so that later I could report to my son another of my plucky little retaliations against circumstance.
    “Really, Howard, what on earth did you think you were doing? Don’t cry. Never mind, it’ll grow back. For God’s sake, Howard, please don’t cry!”
    He held out the scissors, mumbling something I didn’t understand. As he did so, some skeins of hair in his lap slipped to the floor. I picked them up in my hands and brought them to my face; his hair was warm, the cut ends like tiny needle pricks against my cheeks. It smelled of him.
    But it was only hair. Howard stripped of nothing more important than hair, but humiliated and transformed, not so much denuded as defused—the charge dead, the power gone. The pity of it, the misery and foolishness in his eyes. I reminded myself that beneath his disguise of beard and hair, nothing had in fact altered for a very long time. I took the scissors and finished the job.

 
    T he heat was unbearable. Already the day was unbearable. He should not have been left alone with Digger and yet she’d gone, disappeared upstairs. He glared at him but must have failed to convey anger, because Digger shook his head and murmured, “You poor old bugger,” and wandered back