Too Cold For Snow by Jon Gower Read Free Book Online Page B

on generationally. He will learn them all, he thinks, the tales and the poems and give them to his children in turn. He is an extraordinary librarian.
    In a house in Canton a man wonders how on earth he came to buy a three storey house without any stairs. There’s just a big hole and a rope, thick as a naval hawser. To get to his own bathroom he has to climb like an orangutan and his hands have rusty calluses.
    Three hundred thousand stories like these, random and signifying. The life of a city.
    On one street, north of the bus depot, a yellow burger van stands on a bleached-out street, doing a roaring trade. Marty Sathyre smirks demonically as he counts out the change. The punters who dine at his upmarket burger van would never guess what was really in their free range guinea fowl baguettes. They’d gag if they did.
    He’d been out early with the traps – set them in an avenue of decaying trees behind the bakery – where collared doves and venereal town pigeons with club feet foraged and fought over the grain that slipped between lorry and silo. It took him just over an hour to fill a small sack, despatching each of the birds with a Victorian police truncheon he’d boosted from an antiques market – along with a badger hair shaving brush and an ivory handled nose-hair trimmer.
    Marty’s long-time girlfriend Poppaline hated all this butchery and went on and on about it so much that Marty even thought of giving her the heave-ho, and would have done were it not for her trampolining carnal skills.
    His brother helped him pluck the birds and then roast them, giving them an extra ten minutes in the hot oven ‘just in case of disease.’
    The kitchen table was sticky with gizzards and innards. Marty’s hands looked like psychotic glove puppets due to the dozens of small feathers stuck there. He washed them in Swarfega, then looked up the recipe for a Peruvian dish called cuy , then phoned his mate Iorwerth to line up the ingredients. Marty didn’t just confine himself to cooking disease-riddled town pigeons. Oh no, his was cooking fit for an epidemiologist.
    There’s a popular Quechuan folk song, sung by tribes on the high altiplano. ‘Hey old lady’ goes the rhyme, ‘you’re as ancient as the Andes, as fickle as the wind, and if you want me as a son-in law open the door and cook some cuy , whole cuy , mind.’ And then the song turns into a call and response, ‘The door, the door,’ sung in a subsonic, Richard Burton voice and then the words ‘the cuy , the whole one’ in a castrato’s falsetto. It’s a song of gender ping-pong.
    The doorbell chimes, one of those comedy numbers with a recording of a football commentary describing a Cardiff City goal.
    ‘Iorrie, how’s it hanging?’
    ‘Could be better. Pam’s left me. Said she’s moving to Norwich.’
    ‘Norwich. Jesus. Fenland. A place where a man can be his own first cousin. That is serious. I’m so sorry but maybe I can take your mind off things? You still fit for a spot of hunting and gathering?’
    ‘If I really have to.’
    ‘Get me two dozen if you can.’
    ‘Surely.’
    Iorrie, under a cloud of misery, gathered his stuff and drove the van down to the end of the street, hung a left and pulled over. He pulled on a pair of heavy waders over his jeans, put a substantial rubber torch in his waterproof jacket, put up the portable cordon around the manhole cover, then, in one move, prised it open and lowered himself down. The water gurgled with ordure.
    He’d gotten used to the smell of the sewers years ago. In fact he suspected he’d lost the sense of smell altogether when Pam had mentioned the fragrance of night-scented stock wafting out of the garden one August night and Iorrie couldn’t smell a thing.
    The inky water swirled and sloshed around the Victorian brickwork as he made his way to the traps. He’d bought them on the internet, from an industrial estate in Vietnam. Air freighted in three days. Best fifty quid he’d spent in a long