Read Online This Is the Life by Alex Shearer - Free Book Online

all.
    â€œIt’s gone. It was there. It’s gone.”
    I ran out and realized they were both behind me, and wescoured the street, all the way up to the church and back. But the money had gone.
    I don’t know if she ever believed that the money had really been there or that the incident was but a product of a child’s imagination: the aspect of it that dreams of fixing everything for the helpless, hopeless adult world—the child as hero, feted and applauded, saving the day.
    She never mentioned it again. And Louis just looked at me as if I was either a liar or a thief, and he couldn’t decide which, but whichever it was, I was letting the side down.
    I never saw the man again either, but I would think of him, and how he must have felt as he walked away from handing me those banknotes, feeling that he had done a generous and a decent thing that would make someone else’s life easier for a while. He must have been some acquaintance of my father’s. He should have given the banknotes to Louis. Louis would never have lost them. But it had been Louis’s turn to stay in bed that Saturday. But then again, had it been Louis’s turn, maybe he would never have attracted the good fortune, so we were stymied anyway.
    We carried on without the money. Its difference would have been transient and temporary. Maybe that was when I started falling out with God. I just came home from the church one morning and told my mother I wasn’t going anymore. She didn’t try to make me, just asked me if I was sure, and I said I was. She said it was our father’s idea for us to become altar boys and to have to go to church three times a day on Sunday.
    Louis kept on going and said I was letting the side down again. And then there was his brief dalliance with the possibility of the priesthood. But after he came to his senses, he stopped going to church and fell out with God too, althoughour mother hung on to Him, right to the end. But even there, it wasn’t God so much as the fact that all her friends and acquaintances were there, all regular attenders, and without at least the simulacrum of belief, she would have had no social life and have been even lonelier than she was.
    It wasn’t so much God I had the trouble with, as the people who purported to act on His behalf, and who gave Him such a bad name.
    * * *
    â€œYou remember that, Louis?” I asked, as I looked across the table at him.
    We were drinking flat whites—a kind of Aussie latté—and sitting underneath the burners at the café run by the Malaysian girls. Louis was sitting there, looking dapper and neat with his freshly trimmed beard and cropped hair and eyebrows. He had pulled off the beanie hat as the gas burners were roasting him now.
    â€œDon’t,” he said. “Don’t.”
    But I carried on reminiscing.
    â€œYou remember the soup, do you, Louis?” I said. “You remember Mum’s soup? Every Sunday, when we were back from the altar-boy training, and before we had to go off again to benediction. We’d have dinner, remember? Soup made out of mutton bones, and you had to eat it quick before the fat congealed on the top of the soup. You remember?”
    â€œDon’t,” Louis said. “Please don’t.”
    But I was remorseless.
    â€œAnd then mutton for the main course, and then tinned fruit and condensed milk for dessert.”
    â€œDon’t,” Louis said. “It’s too painful.”
    â€œHappy days, eh, Louis?” I said.
    â€œYou’re a bastard,” he told me.
    â€œCome on, Louis. And do you remember, after benediction, how we’d go to the Perkins’s house, because we didn’t have a TV, and they’d let us watch it, and Mum would keep jam sandwiches in her handbag for us to eat on the way home.”
    â€œNo,” Louis said. “No more now. It was bad enough the first time around.”
    â€œYou remember their son,