The Summer Isles by Ian R. MacLeod Read Free Book Online Page A

an Empress out of our dowdy old Queen, his canny embracement of Christianity. Who knows? These things change so quickly.
    I pass illuminated porches bearing individual name-plates—C HURCH H OUSE. D AWRIC. T HE W ILLOWS. —in wrought iron, chinaware or poker-work. It’s quiet now, although scarcely past nine and only just getting fully dark. The houses have a sleepy look. Their curtains are drawn. Faintly, like the movement of ghosts, I can see the shimmer of television screens. The people of Greater Britain have taken so quickly to these flickering dreams. Rooftop aerials point towards the new transmitters with orderly precision. The shop windows of electrical shops along every high street are filled with invasions of greenish-grey Cyclops eyes. Each night, the walls of millions of darkened lounges fill with the shadows of marching bands, high-stepping dance routines, the rheumy leers of northern comics.
    A footstep scuffs in the street behind me. The sound is so unexpected that I turn and look back. There’s silence now. Whoever it is has stopped, and for a moment the street seems empty, the pale concrete road shining beneath the lights and the gathering stars. Then I see where the figure is standing, far too squat and large in the shadow of a parked delivery van to be my slim-bodied acquaintance. A chill sense of watching fills me and a loud pulse begins to beat in my ears as I walk towards it. The thing seems deformed; hardly a figure at all—in fact, nothing but a postbox. And all around me there is only silence. People shut indoors, and living their lives.
    I walk on more briskly. The sense of being followed is still hard to shake from my shoulder. O BERON D RIVE. H AZEL O AK R OAD . I’d be lost by the winding samey look of everything, were it not for the fact that these particular streets are familiar to me. Once or twice before, and equally furtively, I have walked these pavements. Beyond that patch of grass where B ALL G AMES A RE P ROHIBITED , and a stand of oak trees which must have shaded generations of cattle when this was all fields, lies the home of my acquaintance. His two girls will have been put to bed by now, today being a Thursday and their needing to be fresh for school tomorrow. I’d like to think that he and his wife are more cultured than to empty their minds with Jack “Mind My Bike” Warden, The Clarksons , ITMA or whatever is on television tonight. We’ve never discussed such things, but perhaps they tune instead to the Third Programme on their radio-gramophone and settle back to Malcolm Sargent conducting live from the Albert Hall. A chance, as The Swan Of Tuonela plays, for my acquaintance to talk about the way things are going down at the Censor’s Office, and then to plan for the weekend; how they might take the Sunday excursion train and spend the whole day together on Lambourn Downs. My acquaintance, he could easily skip his usual lunchtime trip to the pub, his afternoon in the garden, his evening constitutional walk…
    My footsteps drag now. My lungs and my throat throb and ache. A few bedroom lights are showing in the houses, then puffing out. Already, it’s later than I imagined. The tellies have shrivelled to a white dot, the concert halls have emptied, and all the Jims and the Betties will soon be abed; merrily, guiltlessly, fornicating. Yet, twisted angel of death that I am, I feel a sense of watching from those curtained windows.
    Number 4 Portia Avenue’s black-and-white gable looms into view: the privet and the long strip of drive that lead towards the side of the house where, in these days of ever-growing prosperity, a Ladybird car will probably soon replace the sturdy Raleigh that my acquaintance currently cycles to work on. Old Fatguts can’t last long now, love, and then it’ll be me in that office. My name on the frosted glass … The windows of his house, too, are darkened. But, unlike the others around it, they are also uncurtained. And, in this flowing summer