Out of This World by Graham Swift Read Free Book Online

just happened at that time. The whole tourist thing hit Greece at that time. There was competition. There was an oil crisis. Mind you, Cyprus was a risk …)
    I might even have been there myself. In Cyprus. One more time. Taking shots for UPI of Turkish troops commandeering hotels and foreign-owned villas, and of that other contingent that hadn’t been there in ’57, in ’64 – the baffled, stranded, indignant tourists.
    But I had stopped all that. No news work, no photo work of any kind (the offers came, then petered out). I was making other arrangements. I was facing up to life in a picture-book cottage. Breathing country air. Meeting new neighbours. Like Doctor Warren. Yes, that’s all, just some sleeping pills. Isn’t it strange, Doctor, I can’t sleep, here, where it’s all so peaceful?
    I might have travelled. I mean: just travelled. Been a tourist too. (Hang it, Harry, we all need a holiday some time.) Might have gone to Greece, like Sophie (but eight years later), to find Anna. But I don’t believe in ghosts. I don’t believe that Anna is up there on Olympus, watching Jenny and me descend a breezy hill in Wiltshire. No one knows about Anna.
    I was trying to sleep, and have sweet dreams. I was trying topiece together my nerves and wondering how people ever contrive that impossible trick called Where I Live. I was lying awake haunted by the noise of owls and foxes. I would go for long, determined walks and watch the silver clouds gliding over green hills, rooks flapping over gnarled trees, and say to myself: I don’t believe this. I would come back to the cottage, open the front gate, walk through the picture-book façade and crawl into the tent of myself.

Sophie
 
    But there are certain things that you’ll never remember, aren’t there, Doctor K? All you know is that they must have happened. Like trying to remember the point at which you fell asleep. I don’t remember when I first realized that Mum was never coming back. But maybe it wasn’t a realization, just a knowledge that seeped into my mind. Like the knowledge that Harry was never going to be at home much any more, he was never really going to be my father again. He’d done some deal – that’s how it seemed – struck some bargain with Grandad about being my father. He hadn’t found Mum and brought her home, but he still kept going away – out of guilt maybe. So perhaps if I’d said to him, It’s all right, Harry – it’s all right, Dad – you don’t have to be guilty about Mum, I know she’s dead really, he might have come back to stay for good. But by this time I’d grown to like having Grandad as my father, and I’d grown to realize – and the feeling was mutual – that I was the most precious thing he had.
    Like I was never really afraid of his arm. I mean, his artificial arm. It was something different, something special about Grandad. I wasn’t afraid to touch it, to hold his cold, hard hand. And because I’d never known him without it, for a longtime it never even occurred to me that once he must have had two real arms. He must have been waiting for the question to come, rehearsing the answer. Grandad, what happened to your arm? What he said was: Oh, I swapped it for a medal. Then he showed me the medal. It seemed such a drab little thing, a bit of dull metal and dull red ribbon, to swap for a whole arm. I didn’t know then it was a Victoria Cross, or what you had to do to get a Victoria Cross.
    This was up in the study, surrounded by Uncle Edward’s, I mean, Great-uncle Edward’s books. He got the medal out of a little hinged box from one of the drawers of his desk. Then he showed me a photograph and said, Guess who this is? And the strangest thing about the photograph wasn’t that it was Grandad, taken years and years before, or that in it he had two arms – there it was, his real right arm, holding up a cigarette. The strangest thing was the face. The face was alive. Compared to the face of the Grandad I knew,