Read Online My First Colouring Book by Lloyd Jones - Free Book Online

flat.
    Someone arrives suddenly by his bed. A nurse – she wants to puncture him again. His arms are already strewn with violets and bluebells. To her it’s blood, to him it’s ichor. When he was a young god he exchanged the clear liquid of his vigour with lovers, many. Now his lifeblood is dark and turgid. The wok clicks and clacks in the distance, but it’s not the Chinaman – it’s different, a mechanical noise. Where is he?
    I want to send a message to this old man. A final memo from me to him, on a day unknown, wet and windy or dry and dusty, I don’t care. A mental note that will arrive during his final few seconds, when his breathing rattles to an end and his eyes puddle into two small plastic jellyfish.
    Slowly, he twigs what’s going on around him. They’ve moved him to the hospital. A trading post – he can hear them doing business over his body, bartering. Soon his family will hand him over, swap him for a morning off work and a jarful of ashes, lumpy and grey. The ritual is underway. Someone will throw in a posy of flowers, too, and a couple of damp handkerchiefs. In another room, out of sight, the crucibles are fired up: they’re preparing to melt him down.
    The wok’s clack-beat is suddenly irregular. No, it’s a machine. Systolic, diastolic. Someone’s heart. It’s struggling, it’s in crisis. Is the old man on a sweaty bed in his final throes, is he about to depart? There’s a deathly silence.
    Listen old man, this is the last story you will hear. Are you listening?
    As the nurse skims towards your bed you will hear her soles squeak on the chessboard floor tiles – she will come to you as your body loses its own pattern, begins its slow descent towards ground zero. Moments before the rictus I will be with you for our final exchange. Old man – this is my message, which will be your final thought. When the nurse comes to tattoo more purple on your chest with her electric machine, don’t look at her eyes. Listen to her soles, squealing like two frightened little pigs. Then you’ll remember…
    A day in December, long ago. Grey and gruesome after weeks of rain, saturated, a dead cat floating in the water butt, fur all matted together. You were nearly thirty, late twenties for sure. Quite handsome, still in good shape. It was late at night, with cold hard rain. A party going on in the background. Someone was playing an acoustic guitar, someone else was banging spoons on dirty crockery.
    There was a house in New Orleans, they call…
    God, those parties: raised voices, the usual menagerie of drunken shrieks and laughter. A glass shatters on a floor somewhere and a hoarse collective hooray fills the smoggy kitchen. But you were relatively sober. Why? Perhaps you wanted to keep an eye on her. You always did have a small-town streak in you. Bit of a jerk, really, staying off the booze just to keep tabs on her. If you expect it to happen it will, boyo. Sure as eggs. She ran off in the end, didn’t she? Women don’t like that sort of thing, being watched, doubted. You took a long time to learn. Anyway, round about midnight you heard a squeal of brakes outside the house. Just after the band left. That’s right, you’ve remembered. There was a band there. Hardly anyone noticed them shuffling off because the party had skidded out of control by then. Christ, it’s flooding back now – it was her birthday, nearly everyone legless. The band left, and then you heard the bang. Trademark sounds of the twentieth century: tyres screeching, metal crumpling, glass breaking, then a lone disc of metal – hubcap perhaps – tinkles on the tarmac at the end. It was the same that night so long ago, wasn’t it old man? Are you still with me? Can you hear me through the seeping hiss of summer? Cover yourself man, your gooseskin flanks are naked for all to see. Pitiful. What’s that white residue around your slack