Read Online Damascus by Richard Beard - Free Book Online Page A

jaw like his Dad so as not to cry like his Mum. He hides his face in his hands and tries ever so hard to remember how Rachel used to catch her breath, her hands on her knees, knees bent inwards slightly, looking up and smiling brightly. Everything turns out just fine.

    11/1/93 M ONDAY 09:12
    Henry Mitsui had eaten late breakfasts all over the country in a hundred hotels no better or worse than this one. The tables in the dining room were round and the choice of pictures discreet and uneventful, like the engraving of a frozen Battersea Park on the wall behind his father. The rest of the dining room was occupied by the breakfast silence of single managers looking forward to the morning session of the Institute of Sales and Marketing Management Successful Selling ‘93 Awards. They wore badges to say so, along with their names.
    From the buffet, Henry’s father had served himself a bowl of prunes and a glass of milk. Henry had a pot of tea and
The Times
, which he’d folded in half over his empty plate.
    'I was hoping we could talk,’ his father said.
    'I 
always
read
The Times
at breakfast.’
    His father pursed his lips and chased a prune round his bowl as Henry searched for a particularly British idiom, of the type he’d been collecting, to emphasise the distance between them.
    'It allows me to fire on all cylinders,’ he said.
    He turned his attention back to the paper and the intricate problem of turning a page, flattening the creases and refolding it in half. Not much news today. More people had been killed in Northern Ireland. The Maastricht Treaty came into effect. Nigel Mansell had crashed a sports car and a rare bird had been spotted in a field somewhere. It was a good bad day for celebrity deaths: River Phoenix and Federico Fellini. Otherwise
The Times
was packed with its usual measure of life, with people changing jobs, winning and losing at games, reading and liking and disliking books, hoping for something good on at the cinema, confident that the theatre wasn’t what it used to be or maybe it was, and just as curious now as always to learn of the births, marriages and deaths of strangers. Henry had grown to like this part of the morning, but today he was finding it difficult to concentrate, even on the headlines. He felt that no matter what had gone wrong elsewhere in the world his own problems were more pressing, excluding perhaps those of Fellini and River Phoenix.
    He glanced at the racing page and was relieved to see that the paper’s private handicapper had failed to pick out
Mr Confusion
at Newcastle. Then he laid the paper aside and asked his father what he was looking at.
    â€˜I was wondering how you felt.’
    â€˜Why?’
    â€˜I’m your father.’
    â€˜I feel fine.’
    â€˜Just fine?’
    â€˜I seldom feel murderous, if that’s what you mean.’
    'That’s not what I said.’
    'I seldom feel like hurting people until they squeak. A joke. That’s a joke, Dad.’
    'It isn’t very funny.’
    â€˜Perhaps not.’
    It was true that before leaving Japan Henry hadn’t always been entirely himself. But he still found it astonishing that his father and Dr Osawa should separately conclude that only by asking him lots of personal questions (and smiling sympathetically at the answers) could they save him from a grim future as a serial killer. They’d obviously been corrupted by too many crime novels and police films. Or they’d been taking the newspapers too seriously.
    'I’ve changed,’ Henry said. ‘Ever since I came here. I’ve taken Dr Osawa’s advice and remind myself all the time that everyone has a life.’
    â€˜And does it help?’
    â€˜I’ve not hurt anyone yet, if that’s what you mean.’
    â€˜It’s not just now, Henry. It’s not just today. It’s all the other days as well.’
    â€˜You said you’d already booked the flight.