Read Online The Song House by Trezza Azzopardi - Free Book Online Page A

whiteness
of his pubes. Spreading his hands in front of him, he studies
the familiar tremor. If he could remember where he’d stashed
that half of whisky, he’d have a steadier now. He rummages
through the desk drawer, scrabbling beneath the piles of CDs
and abandoned papers to the very bottom. He put the photographs
in here. It was almost the first thing he did after he saw
Maggie down in the field: crossed the room, straightened his
tie in the reflected glass of the painting on the wall, then had
second thoughts and removed it altogether. He took the two
silver-framed pictures from his desk and hid them away in the
back of the drawer. Slung his tie in there after them. He is
meticulous in his vanity: he didn’t want her to see him as he
used to be; young, with Will hanging off his neck, like a proper
doting dad. And he didn’t want her to see the Vogue portrait
of Rusty in her off-the-shoulder wedding gown.
    He would like – he thinks it through carefully, feeling the
words slip away from him even as they’re forming in his head
– he would prefer Maggie to love him for who he is now. For
what he is now.
    The sound of her fingers on the typewriter keys, like Morse
code, comes up the stairs. He tells himself again: what he is
now is an old fool. He doesn’t care a bit.

    Maggie rips the page from the machine and puts it with the
others in a box file on the desk. She will have to be more
careful; he could find any of this. She will take the file to her
rooms each day, and be vigilant when writing down his notes.
He was playing a game this morning, but she knows he is more
than capable of spying on her. She stretches across to open the
window, pushing it as wide as possible to let in the light. The
air that greets her is green and fresh, blowing up from the river.

    September has always been my mother’s favourite month. She
used to say it was the last gift of summer. And of course, I was
conceived in September. The best gift of all, she used to say,
although at the time she felt it was more like a hex.
    Nell’s pregnancy isn’t the sort they tell you about in maternity
classes. She is violently sick, almost from the first week.
She staggers from toilet to bedroom and back again, resting
one hand on the mossy brick of the lean-to while she pours
the slop of bile from the bucket with the other. She thinks it’s
the vegetables they’re growing. She’s seen the farmer spray his
land; perhaps the chemicals have carried on the wind. Or it’s
too much local cider. She’s heard it said that anything goes into
the mash – rotten apples, unfortunate rats. She thinks if she
doesn’t eat, doesn’t drink, there’ll be nothing to throw up, but
she couldn’t be more wrong; the sickness gets worse and my
mother gets thinner. She’s so dizzy, she has to lie down to stop
falling over. Even Ed starts to worry. He enlists Cindy to come
and help; one look at Nell, and she diagnoses pregnancy.
    Despite the women’s movement, or maybe because of it, Ed
thinks these matters are strictly female. My mother never had
these problems, he brags to Cindy, And this—he gestures to
the empty pantry and the dirty plates – It’s, y’know, a bit of a
drag.
    When Cindy relates this anecdote to Nell, my mother lifts her
sweated head from the bed and cries,
    Poor Ed, it’s a drag is it? Should have kept his cock to
himself!
    Leon is kinder. He fetches spine-cracked novels from the
charity shop, bunches of fireweed picked from the meadow; or
he’ll sit on the end of her bed and play her their latest composition.
Nell could do without the singing; to her ears, their
songs always seem to be about a dark lady and a river, and even
the raindrop sounds of the tabla give her a headache. She has
more pressing matters to worry about than whether Misty
Lure, as Ed and Leon have called themselves, will have enough
material to go on the road.
    At night, Nell hears them in the kitchen below,