Sparrow Nights by David Gilmour Read Free Book Online

you want to see my cunt?
    Rising from my seat as if I’d been violently pinched from below, I hurried down the row, stepping over legs, sorry, so sorry , and rushed up the centre aisle. Bursting into the lobby, I took the escalator downstairs, ran along the hall to a kiosk and bought a package of cigarettes. I sat down at the back of a café. I opened the pack with trembling fingers. I struck the match once, twice, three times. But my fingers were too damp. I pulled another match loose. It lit, I puffed, the tobacco caught. I inhaled a deep lungful. But then, as if I’d just heard an unexpected noise, like a deer alerted in the forest, I had the alarming certainty that I was moments, seconds from an encounter with Emma’s friends. I imagined a group of them walking quickly through the mall; they’d be on their way to a summer camp reunion, or buying a present for a friend’s wedding, and they’d notice—it’d only take one of them—they’d notice me puffing like a madman in the Café Sweet Time. Of course, they’d stop to speak to me. They were like that. Polite with the overcheerfulness of former students. They’d come over, the whole bloody bunch of them. Alison and Robin and Susan and Trish and Emily Jane. Emily Jane? What kind of fucking name is that? The missing Austen sister? They’d tell Emma they saw me smoking cigarettes. He doesn’t smoke, does he? No, I didn’t think so. Mystified, knowing glances. He must be a mess, poor man. And Emma, shaking her head with concern, no, no, that’s true, he doesn’t smoke. Mind you, I haven’t seen him for ages.
    I am leaning in the direction of not being in love with you any more .
    I left the café and went around the corner to a bank of pay telephones. And there, hunched over the last phone, my back to the world, a phone line humming expectantly in my ear, I puffed and puffed and puffed.

C H A P T E R         5
    S omeone moved into the house next door. He had two dogs, terriers or something, and in the morning when he went to work, he left them in the backyard. All day long they went yip, yip, yip . I was in my study preparing for a graduate seminar on Symbolism and Impressionism (the course had been dropped on me at the last moment) when it began to irk me. One never knows why, at a certain moment, neither the one before nor the one after, the nervous system suddenly, like an eel peeping forth from his crevice, takes note of an intruder.
    Taking a different tack this time, a concession, no doubt, to my evolving sense of community, I slipped a note in the letter box mentioning, very politely, the racket and how, after a couple of hours, it “got on the nerves.” I didn’t leave my name or a phone number, but I was, as I said, énormément poli . I got a peek at the dogs, too. They were small, hairy beasts tied to a long leash. None too bright either. They stood in the middle of the yard, looking at the back door and barking, as if their master might emerge at any second and let them in.
    After my note I waited a couple of days. Nothing happened.
    Yip, yip, yip .
    So I wrote another letter, this time on a colleague’s computer. I used an unusual typeface not found on my system. I said, in no uncertain terms, that his dogs were becoming a bother, that if he didn’t find some way to “clam them up,” I was going to call the Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals. I considered the expression “clam them up” a prudent choice. In the event of something untoward happening, no one would give me a second look. After all, why would a man of my stature use a cretin’s turn of phrase?
    I dropped the note in his box, this time after dark. I didn’t want the neighbours spotting me. I live in a Portuguese neighbourhood and those women, once their husbands die, do nothing but snoop at the window.
    I heard barking the next morning. I woke up instantly, as if my body had been waiting, like an animal in the dark. It wasn’t even six, I could