V 02 - Domino Men, The by Barnes-Jonathan Read Free Book Online Page A

onto the train and headed for Dulwich — specifically for 17 Temple Drive, where my grandfather had lived since long before I was born.
    Pushing my bike up the hill, I turned into his still, suburban street, past the ranks of plane trees and those signs which hysterically insisted that this was an area under the jurisdiction of the neighborhood watch.  This was time-travel for me.  It was a wormhole into my childhood.
    Granddad lived in a small terraced house running to seed — books pressed up against the windows, dying weeds curled around the grate, a handwritten sign at the door which read in emphatic Biro:  NO HAWKERS .
    I let myself in, kicked aside the hillock of mail which had accumulated on the mat and was immediately overwhelmed by an acute sense of sadness.  The same smell was everywhere.  Fried sausage — fat, greasy and black — the only thing the old man had ever been able to cook.  It was what he had invariably fed me when I went to stay at half-term, what was on the table when I got back from those operations at the hospital as a boy, what he’d made for me on the night my father died.
    The smell of the past was in my nostrils and I collapsed as though winded into the big armchair in the lounge.  At that moment I would have given anything to be eight years old again, for Granddad to be OK, for my father to be alive, for everything to seem sweeter and more innocent.
    Something small and soft brushed past my legs and I looked down to see a plump gray cat gazing up at me with optimistic eyes.  Tentatively, I reached out a hand.  The animal didn’t shy away so I stroked it again, at which it started up a contented purr.
    “You must be hungry,” I said.
    There were a couple of tins of cat food in the kitchen cupboard.  I opened one and spooned out its contents, which the creature attacked with relish.  As soon as it was done, he started to pester me for more.
    The cat was not the only thing that seemed unfamiliar.  As usual the lounge was filled with books — but they had changed.  I remembered dog-eared scripts (Galton and Simpson, The Goon Show, ITMA, The Navy Lark ), yards of comedy stacked halfway to the ceiling, but now it seemed quite different.  There were volumes here on the most recondite and esoteric subjects — bulky, valuable-looking hardbacks on divination, telepathy, palmistry, the tarot, Freemasonry, Rasputin, metempsychosis, Madame Blavatsky, astral projection, Nostradamus, Eliphas Levi, the preparation of human sacrifice and the end of the world.  Books with terrible, wonderful titles.  Strange-smelling books, tingly to the touch.
    All gone now, of course.
    In the past few years I’d not seen Granddad as often as I ought and had barely visited him at home at all.  Only twice really — once when I was looking for a job and we’d spent the afternoon trawling the employment sections of the broadsheets, and once again, a few months ago, when we’d done much the same thing searching for flats and he’d pointed out the place in Tooting Bec.  After that, once I’d met Abbey, my visits dwindled to nothing.
    Guiltily, I told myself the usual homiletic lies — that I’d been busy at work and settling into a new flat, that it wasn’t the frequency of my visits but their quality — though none of this made me feel any better about my neglect.
    But I still wondered why I hadn’t seen any of those books before.  I suppose he could have bought them recently but, with their cracked spines, makeshift bookmarks and frequent marginalia scribbled in a hand that I recognized at once as his, they had to look about them of a cherished library.
    I was distracted by an optimistic yowl and a renewed, determined pressure on my leg.  The cat gave me a disapproving look and padded away to the kitchen.  I followed, intending to open another can of food, only for the animal to turn, trot upstairs and vanish into the bedroom.  Expecting to find a dead mouse or a week’s worth of mess, I