The Gone-Away World by Nick Harkaway Read Free Book Online Page A

are given cause to complain. The Board, who would for the most part have liked to see Ms. Poynter burned at some form of wooden upright, are too busy battling the Evangelist’s blazing determination to ban on religious grounds several of the texts students are required to study that year.
Gulliver’s Travels
survives the scissors, as does
A Christmas Carol,
but
Modern Short Stories in English
is consigned for ever to the forbidden zone. Sadly, it is so dull that not even this recommendation can make any of us read it more than once.
    My loss of faith is sudden, and it’s not so much a conversion as a reappraisal. Children are still modelling the world, still understanding how it works; their convictions are malleable, like their bones. Thus, I experience no sudden horrible wrench as my belief is uprooted, but rather a feeling like the right pair of glasses being put in front of my face after some time wearing someone else’s. The Evangelist brings me to her study to tell me off for one of Gonzo’s outrages, and I sit waiting for a higher power to intervene and tell her that it isn’t my fault. I look upward, naturally, to the place above my hairline where adults come from, the place where, broadly speaking, heads can be found and persons in authority exert their will in the name of justice. There is no one there. It is unclear in my mind whether I am looking for God in person or a more earthly parent as his instrument, but neither appears. The Evangelist adds a charge of “rolling your eyes at me” to the sheet, and I spend a week in detention after school. Gonzo is mysteriously unwell for the period, with a vile sore throat which is probably infectious but doesn’t stifle his ability to loaf, and which Lydia Copsen also develops. They convalesce a great deal together, feet touching under the blanket as they sit at opposite ends of the sofa and choke abominably.
    Spring becomes summer, summer becomes autumn, and Gonzo and his beloved part company over her inability to comprehend the importance of muddy walks and frantic leaf-kicking. She takes the opportunity to inform him that she went with him only to gain access to his parents’ donkeys, to which Gonzo responds that the donkeys loathe her, despise her silly hair and stupid upturned nose, and they have asked him, by means of sign language, to convey to her their deepest and most unalterable disdain for her opinions in all matters of consequence. Thus avenged, the wretched girl departing in a frozen fury, Gonzo retires to the riverbank and we fish in silence, and this time Gonzo catches a decent-sized trout with his new rod, although it is left to me to kill the creature and present it to Ma Lubitsch, who dutifully guts and cooks it for dinner. Though fortunately it is served alongside a more enjoyable dish of meatloaf.
    Gonzo is not the only person with relationship issues. At Old Man Lubitsch’s insistence, we sit in Ma Lubitsch’s parlour one night in lone-some October, watching the world have something of a tizzy. Ma Lubitsch’s television is very much a curiosity—a wood-panelled thing with chunky buttons which whines and gutters alarmingly and occasionally overheats and has to have a rest. But on the screen, all the same, are more people than I have ever seen in one place, and half of them appear to be very pleased about something and the other half extremely cross, and neither side has a great deal of patience about it. Old Man Lubitsch explains that this is normal in what is called
politics,
which is essentially the business of countries and big groups of people trying to make everyone see things their way. Since no one ever does, very little is achieved and practitioners are voted out and others voted in who reverse the process, so government (as Old Man Lubitsch explains it) is not so much a journey as a series of emergency stops and arguments over which way up to hold the map.
    What has happened today is