The Immaculate by Mark Morris Read Free Book Online

didgeridoo. The sound was primitive and threatening and somehow delicious. Jack felt the hairs on the back of his neck stand up; he loved it when music did that to him. He fished in his pocket and was about to drop a fifty-pence piece into the shoebox by the man’s right foot when he noticed that tucked into the shoebox’s corner were half a dozen CDs, each with the same brown inlay card.
    â€œAre these of you playing?” Jack asked.
    The man glanced up, eyebrows becoming lost in his tangled fringe. Jack was sorry the music had to stop for the man to answer his question. A thread of spittle gleamed briefly between the mouthpiece of the instrument and the man’s lips before snapping.
    â€œYes, friend,” the man said, his voice soft and with no trace of an accent.
    â€œHow much are they?”
    â€œEight pounds.”
    Jack considered for only a second. “Go on then,” he said, and pulled the money from his pocket. When he ascended the escalator, people looked at him as if he were mad. It had crossed Jack’s mind that the CD might be blank, but then he thought that surely there were now too many people with Discmans for the didgeridoo player to risk such a swindle. Besides that, he wanted to believe that anyone who could coax such emotion from a musical instrument had to be possessed of integrity and nobility. The music began again behind him: an evocative, ancient sound. Jack shuddered and hurried up the steps into the sunshine and bustle of Oxford Street.
    He lost the next two hours in the smell and sight and feel of books. Jack loved new books for their glossy covers and their smell of fresh ink, he loved old books for their sense of resilience and history, their musty lived-in odour, their browning pages, lovingly thumbed. His flat was full of books. They were crammed into every niche, into every available space. His study was simply four walls of books, multi-coloured spines towering to the ceiling. Even in the bathroom there were books, piled in the small alcove behind the toilet. The hallway in his flat, already narrow, had been narrowed even further by the installation of a long bookcase. There were small piles of books, still waiting to be sorted, in the most unlikely places: in the cupboard beneath the kitchen sink, on top of the TV, beside his shoes in the wardrobe.
    Though Jack loved his books, his only regret at owning so many was that he would never have time to read them all. Someday, he often promised himself, I’ll read all these. Yet Jack reckoned that for every three books he bought he probably read one. He glanced at his purchases for that day, which he’d assembled in a big yellow plastic Strange Worlds bag. Six new books, two of which were hardbacks, and eight secondhand; he dreaded to think how much money he’d spent. His love of books went back a long way, to a time when losing himself in fiction had been the only escape from his childhood.
    As he travelled the two stops from Leicester Square, where his wanderings had taken him, to Green Park, Jack thought of his last girlfriend, Carol. She’d never understood his fascination with books. Every time he dragged her into a secondhand bookshop she would curl her face into a grimace and exclaim, “How can you buy these dirty old things? You don’t know where they’ve been.” Jack could not remember how he and Carol had ever got together. They had had nothing in common. He supposed the attraction must have been physical. He hadn’t realised how much she was grinding down his spirit, expressing disapproval of every aspect of his lifestyle, until their relationship ended one terrible and glorious Monday morning. That was the closest Jack had ever come to hitting a woman. In the end he had hit the wall instead, denting it and bruising his knuckles. He had called her a “neurotic witch” (not exactly the most scathing put-down in the world, but it had made him feel good at the time),