Read Online Jake's Long Shadow by Alan Duff - Free Book Online

that with Charlotte, oh no, not Charlie. Good girlCharlie, wonderful girl, Charlotte. Isn’t she brilliant, sweetheart? Isn’t she beautiful, darling? Aren’t we blessed to have one of our two children so gifted, so special, so effin’ perfect?)
    Wasn’t my sister a conceited bitch as a result? Though you two
adoring
parents called it self-confidence. But then you would. She was always your favourite. Now she was
Doctor
Charlotte Trambert. (And you, Alistair? What title do you have? What are you? Are there letters to denote unemployed?) Didn’t my father see the damage his ignoring me was doing? (Me, Dad. Your son? ME, Dad! Look over here. I say? Look this way, it’s me, Alistair Seymour, of your surname. I’m a Trambert, too. We can’t all be born perfect. Someone had to get dealt the hand that was not so good. You didn’t exactly play your own good inherited hand well yourself — Dad. So who are you to judge?)
    The dream kept returning. Something kept him standing on the top of that cliff, watching an innocent child drown (calling my name), calling out his name: Alistar! Alistar! And me correcting him: It’s not ar, it’s air. Alist-air. (So get it right.)
    Then a penny dropped: was the child myself and was it me calling out my own name, even if incorrectly as so many have done all my life? Am I the one drowning?
    Kayla! (Kays, I need you, hon. I don’t wanna face these thoughts in my head. Don’t wanna get into that self-analysis, too much of a drag. I’ll get my shit together, man. Just not right now.) Kayla!
Kayla
! (You never said anything about going out of the house today. The hell’ve you got to?) Oh, please don’t let it be you’ve walked out on me.
    What if she’d got someone else? What if she got sick of living like this and just up and took off with a man who’d got a job, got prospects? A man who was a man, not this wimpy shadow, this hollow-chested skinny sixty-five - kilogram weakling who couldn’t be bothered getting a job. (I don’t have to. No law to say I have to
work
, be like
normal
people. I’m not normal. So why should I play by their rules?)
    KAYLA! (Kill myself if she has found someone else.) No, that would be impossible. She loves me.
    Down the passageway, he searched through the living room to where it became the kitchen, a small wall a stride in width said the two areas were different. The living room was swamped by the two oversized second-hand — no, make that third-hand — sofas, sitting fatly out of place there, onlything in common with the surroundings was they’d had a whole lot of lazy butts sitting on them, a whole lot of idle fingers scratching and digging at the armrests worn through their material. Butts and fingers of people I never knew existed before; before I took myself out of what I thought was the stifling middle-class — upper-middle-class, old boy, there’s quite a difference you know — home and found this. (This? Is this found, or is it lost?)
    Kaylaaahhh! Kays … ? You home, hon?
    He turned to the unlikely last room, Sharns’s bedroom. Kayla? Now what?
    Been a lot of things the last few years of this wretched young adulthood, as in every definition of laziness and what it reduced you to doing, the loss of dignity, pride. But I was never a sneak, never an invader of someone’s privacy, let alone my own flatmate’s bedroom. (It’s okay, Sharneeta, I’m just trying to find Kayla. If your room was a lion’s den I’d probably go in as long I could find Kayla. I need absolute assurance she’s not anywhere in this house, don’t ask me why I need it.)
    Kay-lah? You in there? (I need you. My calling for you echoes more hollowly each time. The effin’ hell are you, woman?)
    Alistair close to crying, shook himself out of it, he couldn’t go there, not there. His father’s voice, though, called him a cry-baby.