The Bellwether Revivals by Benjamin Wood Read Free Book Online

me.’
    Oscar looked at his watch. It was getting on for midnight already. There was nothing to do but wait around. He didn’t want to seem too eager, to go about the house looking for her, room after room. She would only be smoking a clove out by the back door, or chatting in the kitchen with her college pals. They would only glare at him if he interrupted their discussion, and she wouldn’t be able to give him her full attention. So what harm was there in having a drink with Yin?
    ‘Cool,’ Yin said. ‘I’ll see what I can rustle up.’
    Oscar flicked through the stack of records over by the window. They were mostly 45s from the eighties, pristinely kept in polythene sleeves, and each one had a white label on the reverse that said: P ROPERTY OF Y IN T ANG . He set them down on the windowsill. Through the seam of the curtains, he could see out onto the tenement steps. And there she was, outside with Eden, smoking, talking, gazing across the quiet floodlit street. She seemed red-faced, upset.
    ‘Drink up.’ Yin appeared beside him with a bottle of Tuborg. Fora second, he glanced down at Iris through the window, too, and then pulled his eyes away, nudging the bottle into Oscar’s arm. ‘I think you should stick around awhile. This whole thing’s gonna wind down soon, I guarantee it. Then we’ll get back to normal.’
    ‘What’s normal around here?’
    ‘I mean it’ll just be the five of us. Me, Marcus, Jane, and
them
.’ He nodded at the window, at the shapes of Iris and Eden on the steps. ‘We’re a pretty closed circle most of the time. Our parties tend to fizzle out fast.’
    Oscar stayed in the living room, talking with Yin on the chesterfield, until they’d drunk a few more beers between them. Yin was from California, and that made him very different from the others. He was chatty, laid-back, but he spoke frankly at times, never worried about offending Oscar’s sensibilities. He was studying for a degree in history. Though he lacked Eden’s intellectual bluster, it didn’t make him any less sophisticated. He spoke about important, complex affairs like weapons of mass destruction and the Bush administration in a brisk, uncomplicated way, as if they were categories on a game show, and talked freely about his life and family in San Francisco. Sometimes, he let out a deep guffaw to emphasise his jokes.
    Yin seemed to hold such a deep affection for the Bellwethers that it spilled out each time he spoke. He would always move the conversation back to them: ‘Yeah, I mean, my mom’s side of the family is weird that way. They don’t let anyone get close to them. It’s a Chinese thing, I guess. But then, maybe
not
. It’s kind of the same deal with Eden and Iggy, too. We’ve always had our own little clique going’—he pronounced it ‘click’—‘and I guess we all like it that way, otherwise we’d let a few more people into the circle.’
    ‘So why don’t you?’
    Yin grinned at him drunkenly. ‘I don’t know. I guess we don’t meet too many people we like that much. It’s hard for people to come in from the outside. We’ve known each other a long time.’
    ‘Oh.’
    ‘Don’t worry about it. You’re doing fine. You’ve already got Iris on your side—that’s pretty clear—and Eden won’t let just anybody hang out with him. He must have a good feeling about you or you wouldn’t even be here … I, on the other hand, am still to be convinced.’ Oscar couldn’t tell if he was joking until his face cracked into a smile and he began laughing through his teeth. ‘No, I’m kidding. You’re okay by me.’
    Yin was right about the party winding down. Around midnight, the last few guests were putting their coats on in the hallway and others were mounting their bikes outside. The final seven-inch was spooling on the record player. There were only four of them in the room: Oscar, Yin, Marcus, and Jane, who’d taken a seat on the other chesterfield, her thin legs crossed and stretched