Read Online Angelica Lost and Found by Russell Hoban - Free Book Online

came to SF from County Antrim a while back on a visit and stayed on. He inherited enough money to buy the bar and here he is. His wife left him three years ago and now he’s divorced and has a teenage daughter he rarely sees. The last I heard she was living in Rome with her art teacher.
    ‘Hi, Angie,’ he said. ‘I’m glad you recommended this. Ariosto’s a real page-turner. His heroes and their journeys far/All come to life here in this bar,/With beauties needing to be saved/And many dangers to be braved.’
    ‘It’s catching,’ I said. ‘Those tales of his that I have read/Have made big trouble in my head:/I don’t know if I’m here or there/or drifting somewhere in the air.’
    ‘Tell me what the problem is,’ said Clancy. ‘That’s what I’m here for. The tables and the chairs and the bar are just a front.’
    ‘Have you done Canto Eye Vee yet?’ (I always speak Roman numerals as their alphabet letters.) ‘The part where the hippogriff is described?’
    ‘I have that.’
    ‘Does he seem real to you?’
    ‘Yes, in the same way as selkies or werewolves. Maybe you should have a drink, just to settle the dust.’
    ‘You’re right as always, Clance. Let me have a Peroni and a double Laphroaig.’
    ‘A boilermaker on an empty stomach: I’m assuming you’ve had no lunch.’
    ‘Right again. Maybe Charlie can do me a steak sandwich.’
    Charlie, who was lounging in a chair by the window, waved to me and fired up his grill. He was a taciturn man with a hoarse voice and he looked piratical, always with a kerchief round his throat.
    ‘All right, Angie. Tell me about the hippogriff.’
    ‘His name is Volatore.’
    ‘I didn’t see that in the book.’
    ‘It’s not in the book.’
    ‘Then where’d you find it? Google? Wikipedia?’
    ‘He told me it.’
    ‘Ah! You haven’t a drop taken already, have you?’ His head a little bit on one side as he looked at me. Askance.
    ‘Cold sober, Clance. Scout’s honour.’
    ‘What were you on when he told you?’
    ‘Only a little Laphroaig to steady my nerves – not enough to get me drunk.’
    ‘Where were you at the time?’
    ‘In my apartment. I had Monteverdi on the Bose, Emma Kirkby singing “Olimpia’s Lament”. The music lifted him up to my window.’
    I could feel that first encounter with Volatore becoming huge in me, wanting to burst like a watermelon dropped from a tenth-storey window. I knew I’d be sorry but I couldn’t stop.
    ‘You were saying?’ said Clancy.
    ‘I asked him in for a cup of tea.’
    ‘How’d he get in?’
    ‘Through the window.’
    ‘And him quite a big fellow with hooves and talons and wings and all.’
    ‘He thought small.’
    Charlie brought my sandwich over and I sipped my beer.
    Clancy waited until I had somewhat appeased my hunger and my thirst.
    ‘I’m all ears,’ he said then, looking prescient.
    ‘I gave him tea in a bowl, because of his beak.’
    ‘As one would. Go on.’
    ‘I don’t know what came over me …’
    ‘Take your time, choose your words carefully.’
    ‘I wanted him to kiss me.’
    ‘Not a very soft kisser, with that beak.’
    ‘He offered to change to a man-shape, but I told him I wanted him as he was.’
    ‘Wanted him as in “I want you”?’
    ‘Yes.’
    ‘Hang on a moment,’ said Clancy.
    He went to the bar, came back with a bottle of Bushmill’s and a glass, poured himself a stiff one, drank it down, and while catching his breath indicated to me that I should continue.
    ‘Well of course he was too big for me so I asked him to think himself and his business smaller.’
    Why was I telling Clancy all this? Did I want to make it irrevocably real by reliving it before him? Did I want to word myself naked under a beast to excite him and myself? Was I compelled by some inner demon to commit this act of betrayal? Yes to all of the above as I continued, ‘And when the size was right I …’
    ‘You don’t have to say it all out.’
    ‘Yes, I do because we’re talking