Two-Way Split by Allan Guthrie Read Free Book Online Page A

new piano for Robin. And the truth was, much as Robin hated to admit it, his dad had been quite talented. But, when Mum became pregnant with Donald, Dad had given up his musical aspirations in favour of a regular income in the bakery department of a meat-processing factory. When Robin followed his brother into the world two years later, Dad saw no way out of his mind-numbing job. According to Mum, that's when the drinking started, and after the accident, it accelerated rapidly.
    Funny thing was, once he'd arrived at his new school, and despite the growing frequency of his nightmares, Robin never wet the bed again.
    Four years later, music school was over. Since starting college he had been practising eight hours a day. One day, about a month into first term, bolts of fire started shooting down both arms. His fingers hurt when they moved and his wrists burned when they bent. The doctor diagnosed tendonitis and prescribed physiotherapy. Three months later, three months without being able to practice, he was no better, so the doctor prescribed anti-inflammatories, which, after a few days, enabled Robin to play for a couple of hours without pain. This joyous state lasted for all of a week, when he woke up one day to discover his arms were numb, he had difficulty moving his fingers even slightly and his wrists were grossly swollen. He spent the next year and a half seeing all sorts of specialists who could only agree on one thing: he had one of the most severe cases of ulnar neuropathy any of them had ever seen. On good days he tried to play. Most days, something as physically undemanding as brushing his teeth brought tears to his eyes. He left college after fifteen different treatments, including two operations to relocate the ulnar nerve, had failed to help. Mum was heartbroken when it became clear that he wasn't going to be the great concert pianist she'd always dreamed he'd become. His dad said it was all psychosomatic attention-seeking bollocks and the boy ought to get a bloody honest job and stop moaning like a fairy. But by then his leech of a son didn't care what Daddy thought.
    "Sir."
    Robin heard the waitress clearly enough over the keening of the soprano saxophone, but for no good reason he pretended he hadn't.
    "Sir."
    One more time? No. He turned his head.
    "Would you mind sitting over here, sir?" Her arms were bare, the skin pale and lightly freckled. Her left hand held a notepad and, with her right, she tapped a pencil against her teeth. She was in her late teens.
    "What colour's your hair?" he asked her.
    "Excuse me, what—"
    He smiled at her. "You mind me asking? You look like a redhead. But I can't tell." His eyes rolled upwards. "Because of your hat."
    "Have to wear hairnets and these stupid things." She pushed the stupid thing, a hat, back with her pencil, exposing an extra millimetre of damp forehead. "Can't have hair in the food."
    "Rules, eh?"
    "Tell me about it."
    "You know what?" he said. "The hat sort of suits you."
    "Yeah?" She laughed. "Right."
    "Your eyebrows are fair. But I'm banking on you being a redhead." He nodded. "You going to put me out of my misery?"
    She clamped the pencil between her teeth.
    "My wife has red hair," he continued. She'd have shot him if she heard him say that. Carol didn't have red hair, or even reddish brown hair, or, God forbid, ginger hair. "Auburn, she calls it."
    The waitress frowned, chewed her pencil, slid it out of her mouth and waved it around as she spoke. "I just sort of think of my hair as brown, you know. Light brown. But it's got traces of red in it. In a certain light, sometimes, it can look auburn." She nodded. Pointed her pencil at him. "Definitely."
    "Sheila." The voice belonged to a fat waiter balancing a tray of assorted drinks above his head while he struggled to squeeze through a narrow gap between two chairs. A patch of sweat stained the armpit of his purple shirt. "Can you get table seven when you're finished with the gentleman?" He lowered the tray and