Read Online Various Pets Alive and Dead by Marina Lewycka - Free Book Online Page A
Authors: Marina Lewycka
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using up almost half his kitty, and as an afterthought takes a long punt on SYC on the AIM with the rest. It all takes less than ten minutes, but his tension has built up to such a pitch that it feels like an hour. He breaks out into a sweat as the broker confirms his details. There’s that smell again – aniseed and benzene – cloying in the close atmosphere. Yes, Tim the Finn must have been in here nursing his troubled prostate, poor guy.
When all the transactions are confirmed, he lets himself out into the corridor carefully and returns to his desk. The retracement is still there, shimmering through the skein of graphs on the monitor like a mermaid tangled in a fisherman’s net against an ebbing tide – there for the taking. If the markets are really set to fall, this could be the big one, the once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to scoop in his thousands as they plunge. He watches the shimmering pattern of numbers resolve and fade and remake themselves, and whispers under his breath: ‘Bring it on!’
DORO: Under the watchful eye of Che Guevara
It’s quite odd, thinks Doro, dibbing holes in the vegetable bed, that neither Serge nor Clara expressed any great enthusiasm for their parents getting married. Odd too that Marcus suggested it, in the context of adopting Oolie. She hasn’t discussed it with Oolie yet. It would mean explaining that she and Marcus aren’t her real parents, and she’s not ready to start digging up heartaches which go back to the commune days.
This morning, on the way back from the nursery where she’d bought the seedlings, she drove past the lane that led to Solidarity Hall, and was struck with a pang of nostalgia so intense it was hard to tell whether it was sweet or bitter. In those days, she never seemed to worry about anything. Everything was more vivid, the days longer, the colours brighter, the music better, the people more amusing. She smiles, remembering – and knowing this is a sign she’s getting old, but indulging herself anyway.
The dry soil crumbles under her hands as she prepares the rows and wonders whether it’s too early for planting out the spring cabbage. She sticks the seedlings in the holes, pressing them in with her fingers. In a way, her children are
her
cabbage seedlings, sown in the friable soil of the seventies, nourished by a rich compost of well-rotted ideas through which they’d all tunnelled like curious worms in search of adventure and a freer, fairer society – whatever that might mean. Like so much else, it seemed clearer, brighter in those days. Now her seedlings have been planted out in a much harsher world. She worries. Will they survive and thrive?
She thought it was the garden she missed more than anything – that near-wild quarter-acre she’d tamed and cultivated – the sunflowers, the tomatoes, even the bloody rabbits. After the fire in 1994, when they moved to their house in Doncaster, with its handkerchief square of lawn, she put her name down for an allotment. It took her seven years to reach the top of the queue, but now here she is, in this sunny forgotten corner on the edge of the city, planting out her spring cabbage. And realising that what she really misses is not the garden after all, but her own prime of life, and the childhood of her children.
They had arrived at Askern in November 1969, through one of those leaps of imagination typical of the post-68 ferment. At that time it was deeply uncool to admit to having been to public school, or being upper class or having money. So it came as a surprise when they discovered that Fred the Red, despite his woolly hat and cockney drawl, had access to a family fund. Fired with enthusiasm by their conversations, he went out one day and bought the former coal owner’s mansion at Askern for £1,300 at an auction of Coal Board property, without actually ever having seen it. He announced the news as they were sitting around the table in the Hampstead kitchen.
‘We will move from
When all the transactions are confirmed, he lets himself out into the corridor carefully and returns to his desk. The retracement is still there, shimmering through the skein of graphs on the monitor like a mermaid tangled in a fisherman’s net against an ebbing tide – there for the taking. If the markets are really set to fall, this could be the big one, the once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to scoop in his thousands as they plunge. He watches the shimmering pattern of numbers resolve and fade and remake themselves, and whispers under his breath: ‘Bring it on!’
DORO: Under the watchful eye of Che Guevara
It’s quite odd, thinks Doro, dibbing holes in the vegetable bed, that neither Serge nor Clara expressed any great enthusiasm for their parents getting married. Odd too that Marcus suggested it, in the context of adopting Oolie. She hasn’t discussed it with Oolie yet. It would mean explaining that she and Marcus aren’t her real parents, and she’s not ready to start digging up heartaches which go back to the commune days.
This morning, on the way back from the nursery where she’d bought the seedlings, she drove past the lane that led to Solidarity Hall, and was struck with a pang of nostalgia so intense it was hard to tell whether it was sweet or bitter. In those days, she never seemed to worry about anything. Everything was more vivid, the days longer, the colours brighter, the music better, the people more amusing. She smiles, remembering – and knowing this is a sign she’s getting old, but indulging herself anyway.
The dry soil crumbles under her hands as she prepares the rows and wonders whether it’s too early for planting out the spring cabbage. She sticks the seedlings in the holes, pressing them in with her fingers. In a way, her children are
her
cabbage seedlings, sown in the friable soil of the seventies, nourished by a rich compost of well-rotted ideas through which they’d all tunnelled like curious worms in search of adventure and a freer, fairer society – whatever that might mean. Like so much else, it seemed clearer, brighter in those days. Now her seedlings have been planted out in a much harsher world. She worries. Will they survive and thrive?
She thought it was the garden she missed more than anything – that near-wild quarter-acre she’d tamed and cultivated – the sunflowers, the tomatoes, even the bloody rabbits. After the fire in 1994, when they moved to their house in Doncaster, with its handkerchief square of lawn, she put her name down for an allotment. It took her seven years to reach the top of the queue, but now here she is, in this sunny forgotten corner on the edge of the city, planting out her spring cabbage. And realising that what she really misses is not the garden after all, but her own prime of life, and the childhood of her children.
They had arrived at Askern in November 1969, through one of those leaps of imagination typical of the post-68 ferment. At that time it was deeply uncool to admit to having been to public school, or being upper class or having money. So it came as a surprise when they discovered that Fred the Red, despite his woolly hat and cockney drawl, had access to a family fund. Fired with enthusiasm by their conversations, he went out one day and bought the former coal owner’s mansion at Askern for £1,300 at an auction of Coal Board property, without actually ever having seen it. He announced the news as they were sitting around the table in the Hampstead kitchen.
‘We will move from
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