Precocious by Joanna Barnard Read Free Book Online

tea.
    ‘Good morning, sunshine.’
    You push your sunglasses onto your head and fix me with your steely eyes. Something inside me flips over.
    ‘I bunked off work,’ I say.
    ‘I’m honoured.’
    ‘Don’t be – I don’t like it much.’
    ‘So why the laptop?’
    ‘A prop, I suppose.’
    ‘Shame. I thought you were tapping out your masterpiece.’
    ‘Yes, well … not quite got around to writing that yet.’
    ‘Again, shame.’ You look at me, unblinking. ‘I always thought it was in you.’
    I feel my throat start to colour. ‘Maybe it still is,’ I shrug, ‘I don’t know, just … life gets in the way.’
    ‘I know. Tedious, isn’t it?’
    Your grin makes me want to move nearer to you, want to touch you. It is lopsided: your imperfect teeth, your pale lips and the wrinkles that frame them, deeper on your left side. (I wonder whether that’s because you always blow out cigarette smoke to the left? Is that how it works?) It rarely reaches your eyes, but it does light up a face that otherwise would seem hard, with its scar, its angular nose. I want nothing more than to be the cause of that grin.
    I want to say ‘Why are we here? What is this?’, but I know what your response will be: ‘you tell me’. So I say brightly, ‘So what shall we do today?’
    ‘We’ll drink tea,’ you grimace as you take a slug, ‘correction:
weak
tea, and then we’ll go for a walk. We’ll talk.’ You check your watch. ‘I only have an hour or so.’
    ‘Oh.’ I feel a little knot in my stomach tighten. I’d assumed we would have all day. I had thought … I don’t know what I had thought. ‘If I’m sick, I have to be sick all day.’ I can’t suppress the petulance in my voice. I look at my laptop.
    You laugh a cold laugh. ‘I’m sure you have better things to do than hang around with an old man like me anyway.’
    ‘Of course.’ But the knot is twisting, and rising in my gullet. I’m suddenly conscious of the thudding tick tock of the oversized hotel clock. I wonder what you are doing later, what it is that will take you from me, but I can’t ask. I watch you yawn, lean back, stretch out your legs. The humming conversations, the plinking of computer keys, the clashing hotel colours and the suits, cases and phones are making me claustrophobic. ‘Drink up then.’
    You are pleased to be outside, because you can smoke. You wave your cigarette hand at the canal.
    ‘Do you know why it’s orange?’
    I laugh. ‘I don’t, actually. I’ve always just sort of accepted it. It’s weird, though, isn’t it?’
    You stop walking, look at me, take a drag.
    ‘What is it?’ I ask.
    You exhale; it’s like sighing. ‘I want to give you a good story now. Want to tell you some magical reason why it’s orange. But the truth is fairly pedestrian.’
    ‘Oh?’
    ‘Yep, something to do with iron ore, or something. Even more depressingly, there’s a big project underway to clean it up. Make it … I don’t know, the colour of every other canal. Dirty grey.
Not
orange.’ You suck on your cigarette again, offer me a drag. I decline, but watching it slip back in between your lips wish I had accepted.
    ‘That
is
disappointing.’ I pause. ‘Did you know there is no word in the English language to rhyme with orange?’
    ‘I think you told me that, years ago. Or maybe I told you!’
    ‘Ha! Memory failing, is it?’
    ‘Sunshine, everything’s failing.’ You reach over and grab my hand, squeeze it, then immediately let go.
    ‘Speaking of memories,’ you say, ‘whatever happened to that friend of yours … Lorna? Laura? Laura.’ You nod decisively.
    ‘Laura, yeah.’ I choose my words carefully. ‘We’re still friends. I still see her, but we’re not as close as we used to be. But I suppose that’s normal?’ I know I’m rambling now but this knowledge only seems to be making it worse, and bringing with it a nervous giggle, and when I try to take the rising inflection out of my voice I seem to replace it