Wrote For Luck by D.J. Taylor Read Free Book Online Page B

the sidewalk and there was a man with a peaked visor and arm-bands on his shirt selling ice-cream out of a portable refrigerator. In the distance there were white birds criss-crossing the blue sky and beyond that long shipsapparently motionless on the horizon, so slow-moving that they were almost inert, like pieces of balsa wood laid out on an azure blanket. ‘This is the life,’ Huey said vaguely. He was a tall boy, taller than the man in the college sweater, but his weight was not adequate for his height and made him look spindly. ‘You must be careful,’ she said, ‘not to sit in the sun with that pale skin of yours.’ There had been an occasion when Huey had come back lobster-coloured.
    ‘Oh, I’ll be careful,’ he said. He had the remote, far-away look that he sometimes wore on these excursions to public places. ‘It’s awfully hot,’ she said, aware of the sun on her bare arms, the warm sand spilling over the tops of her shoes, the draw-string of her bag digging into her shoulder. ‘That’s right,’ he said. Something was concerning him beyond the sheen of the water, the long, low ships and the crowds at the beach, and he said, not curiously but as if courtesy impelled him to ask: ‘How long is it till you stop off working for Mr Lonigan?’ She had an answer to this which had already been doled out to several other enquirers. ‘On next Friday fortnight,’ she said. ‘I can’t stay a moment longer. I don’t know why but I just can’t. I guess the other girls will buy me a cake. They usually do. When Susie Montgomery left to get married they bought her ever such a nice one. But she was there five years and I’ve only been there two.’ She thought about Lonigan’s, with its crackling fan sending the stale air around the green baize table, and the odds and ends of cloth lying around in heaps, and the trimming scissors as big as shears, and realised that the only thing that made it tolerable was the fact that she was leaving it. ‘Two years,’ Huey said, who hadnever been in a job longer than six months. The sunlight was shining off the buttons of his jacket and he stepped gingerly over the sand, fearful of bumping into people or putting his feet into the picnic baskets.
    They found a spot near the shoreline, where some young kids were ducking each other in the shallows while a lifeguard looked benevolently on and a mustachioed old man in a one-piece bathing costume swam backwards and forwards against the tide, labouring like a grampus, and established themselves on the sand, and she clasped her hands over her knees and looked out into the far corners of the lake, beyond the line of ships, where the water was greyer and less tractable. Huey took off his shoes and socks and sat with his feet stretched out in front of him. They were enormous feet – size twelve, at least – and her mother had once said that if Mrs Niedermeyer ran short of a clothes line then all she had to do was to hang a string from one of his big toes to the other. Sometimes he picked up pebbles and threw them into the water, and at other times he squeezed the parcel that contained his bathing clothes into a pillow and lay flat on his back staring up at the sky. To right and left the crowds of people extended as far as the eye could see: couples running in and out of the water; families grouped around their rugs and baskets; men in straw hats with their pants furled to knee level walking up and down. ‘Don’t you want to bathe?’ she asked. Huey threw a little stone, so weakly that it barely made the water-line. ‘I don’t know,’ he said. ‘I guess I don’t feel like it. Maybe I will later.’ The young kids had stopped ducking each other and were staring hopefully out over the water, as if they expecteda frogman to emerge from the depths, but the old man in the one-piece bathing costume was still labouring strenuously up and down, ever more pious and determined, as if only a sense of responsibility, some weighty