Read Online Noah's Ark by Barbara Trapido - Free Book Online Page B

home?’ he said. Glancing with sideways eyes because the memory of her emotional display that afternoon now embarrassed her, she nodded and turned to show them in. The inviting half-moons of her pre-teen female buttocks protruding from the tacky but well-fitting shorts was not a sight to pass Arnie by and he whistled through his teeth. Camilla’s delicate but undeniable beauty was already proving to be an embarrassment to her on the school bus, where clumsy schoolboys jostled as they passed her and cleared their throats pointedly in the hope of catching her attention. Arnie was in another league, of course. Bathed and shaven, he was now dressed in a snowy-white Indian shirt with a small collarless neckband and immaculate canvas jeans. He presented a less bizarre appearance than that which Ali had encountered earlier. He wore his hair neatly combed though it flounced thickly at the temples like Mark Twain’s. The toenails protruding from his leather sandals were manicured and scrupulously clean.
    ‘Call me when you’re sixteen, kid,’ he said.
    ‘Eighteen,’ Noah said firmly. ‘Aren’t you in enough troublewith the law already?’ He stepped into the living room from the tiny hall.
    ‘Mrs Bobrow?’ he said. ‘Mrs Bobrow?’ Because Ali, although the hour was almost eight, was giving her whole attention to four small girls who were clearly not her own. They appeared to be engaged in amateur theatricals and were at that moment playing dead upon the creamy Spanish rug, breaking out of stiffness into brief giggles occasionally, and scuffing at the rug with their sharp little patent shoes. One of them, a rosy blonde, had taken off her pants and was uninhibitedly airing her pudgy, six-year-old pubes. Noah stood and waited, watching the story unfold. Ali was narrator and also, intermittently, villain and stepmother.
    ‘Please,’ she said, looking up for a moment, ‘sit down.’
    ‘Get on with it,’ said the blonde child rudely. Noah sat down warily in one of Ali’s fragile basket chairs which tilted gently leftwards under his weight. He hit his head lightly upon an appliquéd lampshade which hung – for aesthetic reasons – too low over the chair and he steadied it politely with his hand.
    ‘Hi,’ Arnie said affably, as he stepped with a wide stride over the four recumbent girls.
    ‘Shut up,’ said the vocal blonde. ‘We’re acting. We’re the Snow Whites and we’re dead.’
    ‘What,
all
of you?’ Arnie said, in lively disbelief. ‘You’re
all
Snow Whites? Isn’t there only one?’
    ‘We all wanted to be her, so there’s four,’ said the child conclusively. ‘Now shut up.’ Noah observed meanwhile that Ali had about her a trance-like serenity which came sometimes from growing beyond despair. It gave her a touching, frail nobility.
    ‘And the prince?’ Arnie said, needling persistently. ‘He gets
all
of you? He gets the four dead girls?’ A small sullen Prince Charming, brutalised by a recent haircut, was lurking in a corner quietly fiddling with his genitals as he straddled Ali’s broomhandle – his makeshift horse – awaiting his cue.
    ‘Belt up,’ said the blonde. ‘Or bugger off.’ What Noah andArnie were witnessing was the vestige of an open-house policy established by Mervyn who had declared himself in favour of communal living and neighbourhood support. The nuclear family was an evil, he said, and privacy a bourgeois luxury. The problem for Ali was not that Mervyn had now gone. It had always been that where the nuclear family still held as the norm – and the normal, by definition, stubbornly adhered to such norms – the people who invaded Ali’s life to consume her Nescafe in great quantities and to unload their burdens, or their offspring, were on the whole in no emotional or material position ever to support Ali in their turn. They left her their children to care for while they listened in pubs to songs of protest and left her their marijuana plants to water while they set