Read Online Linger Awhile by Russell Hoban - Free Book Online Page A

would want to cuddle her and make her feel better but I’m prettysure her heart isn’t broken. Mine is, and who is responsible for that? Justine? Not really. How could I think she would want me, what have I to offer? So here I was in the Sunday evening of my old age with a broken heart, all alone and being beaten at chess. I drank some cask strength with very little water and I felt terrible in a much classier way. Burning all the way down. ‘Parv,’ said the inner Irv.
    ‘I know,’ I replied. Inner Irv says words that are meaningless but I usually know what he means.
    When the phone rang I picked it up and said, ‘At the third stroke, the time will be exactly Sunday evening.’
    ‘Irv?’ said Grace Kowalski.
    ‘Hi, Grace,’ I said. ‘What’s new?’
    ‘It’s Wednesday, Irv.’
    ‘Maybe it is where you are but here it’s Sunday evening.’
    ‘Are you drunk?’
    ‘Yes. Would you like to take advantage of me?’
    ‘Of course, but we have serious things to talk about as well. Can you come over or shall I come to you?’
    ‘I’ll come to you – your place smells strange and beautiful like the things you make and like you.’
    ‘Irv!’ she said. ‘Think serious.’
    ‘I’ll be very serious,’ I said. ‘I’ll see you shortly.’ Feeling almost middle-aged again, I went forth to Fulham Broadway, where millions have been spent to convert the old tube station into a Nowheresville shopping mall with Books Etc., Boots, a Virgin Megastore, Starbucks, Orange and other commercial enterprisesset in a brilliantly illuminated desolation that is part of the greater programme to turn London into Noplace. Shaking my head as I do each time, I took the lift down to the District Line platform and got an Edgware Road train to Notting Hill Gate where I took the Central Line to Oxford Circus. The trains were not crowded and none of the passengers were talking into little telephones or smiling as they tapped out text messages. Some were reading books or newspapers. All of the faces, young, old, male, female, white and brown and black, were part of the many faces of the great sad thing that moves itself from here to there and back again in all forms of transport.
    At Oxford Circus I came up to the surface and the squalor of Argyll Street and people buying things they’d be better off not eating.
Chitty Chitty Bang Bang
was playing at the Palladium, starring Michael Ball. Well, I thought, it’s nice that he has the work. Long ago I read somewhere that all of the visible world is
maya
, illusion, but whatever you call it, it’s what you have to deal with. I carried on to Great Marlborough Street, then over to Berwick where I went well past Grace’s place to buy a bottle of Stolichnaya at Nicolas, then back to All That Glisters.
    ‘Yo, Grace,’ I said as I pressed the intercom button.
    ‘Yo, Irv,’ she said, and came down to let me in. A hug and a kiss and I gave her the latest Justine news as we went up to the studio and its professional smells. The unfinished piece on her workbench was a three-legged toad in green and orange stones with an I Ching coin in its mouth.
    ‘I got the idea for the I Ching coin from A2 Feng Shui on the internet. I don’t know what’s on theirs.’
    ‘What’s the hexagram on yours?’
    ‘Number forty-two,
I, Increase
, SUN CHEN, with nine at the beginning, so it changes to number twenty,
Kuan, Contemplation
, SUN K’UN.’
    ‘That’s a very hopful toad, Grace.’
    ‘Where there’s life, there’s hop,’ she said, and we drank to that and sighed a little. ‘OK,’ I said. ‘Talk seriously to me.’
    ‘Form is emptiness and emptiness is form,’ she said. ‘You know what I’m saying?’
    ‘Of course,
ça va sans dire
, ’I said. ‘It walks without talking.’
    ‘That’s what I like about you, Irv, everything doesn’t have to be spelt out.’
    ‘So tell me, I’m all ears. Tell me while we’re still coherent.’
    ‘I think,’ she said, ‘it’s time for me to stop