Catherine Harris The Family Men (v5.0) (epub) id

[ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]
.The situation might have felt less fraught if he’d been clearer about it himself, what it was that he had found so unsavoury, why he’d felt the need to behave as he had (then and since then), instead of struggling with this overwhelming sense of failure and regret, it being so unlike him to get “caught inside” (even when he was surfing, he rarely got trapped within the sets).Everything had been on the level.Certainly he hadn’t done anything wrong.Technically, nobody had done anything wrong.Or had they? And if so, was his reaction a sign that he should feel proud? Hadn’t he declared something about his capacity? Shown them something of himself.Too much though, or maybe not enough? So hard to gauge.That being the sticking point with his brother, he is sure of it (Matt begrudgingly returning his trophy to him the following day, Harry loath to touch it), why Matt gives him the third degree, Matt usually being the one to lead the charge, especially at work, though not sure what one would call it in this case.It wasn’t as though he’d mulled it over beforehand, it was implausible that he could have, there was nothing to consider.He just went with his gut.A split-second decision, an involuntary response, he was acting purely on instinct, overcome perhaps by the music and the heat.It was only afterwards that he computed the consequences, had some distance on the way his behaviour might have been interpreted by everyone else (the disgusted expressions on the boys’ faces still visible in his mind’s eye – what is wrong with him? – he doesn’t need it spelled out to know they’d happily smack the shit out of him at the first opportunity).In the kitchen his mum watches him plonk himself in front of the fruit bowl without so much as a good morning as he reaches for a banana, biting off the stem, the tough fibrous peel no match for his continuing preoccupations.“How was Mass?” asks Diana, not really caring about the service, she’s long given up believing in the promises of organised religion, her ex-husband has seen to that, but the Club encourages the boys to attend, good public relations, they say, and she is happy enough to let her kids play along – one cup is as good as the other – especially if some of that credit is attributed to her productive influence.Credit where credit is due.Harry shrugs, takes another bite of the banana.He knows what his mother wants, a report on who he’s seen, which of her friends were there, which ones weren’t, who was sitting with who, anything interesting they might have said or done.Typically he would have entertained her with a few choice guesses at what was being discussed in the confessional – the provisional status of Sally Connolly’s soul a safe bet, having recently abandoned her husband for the very married arms of her youngest’s fourth-grade teacher – but that was before, prior to what he has come to think of as “the day”, the pivot point delineating time as belonging to then and now, a marker after which everything changed, the old rules no longer applying.Now he doesn’t have the inclination for those kinds of frivolities, as though to go along is to be complicit in some aspect of the same game, a game in which he doesn’t want to participate.It irritates him that his mother even asks, most of the time telling him to save the details for his dad, that she doesn’t want to know, preferring to keep her head in the sand – I’m over it, a standard refrain.She doesn’t really care now either, he knows that too, aside from the fact that he is reluctant to divulge anything, to pander to her curiosity.“It was the same,” he garbles, his mouth still full of banana, “exactly the fucking same.” Thinking of the crowded anteroom of smokers and gossipers, two-thirds of the congregation, the women like slutty mourners in their black lace and short synthetic skirts, the men more interested in that parade of push-up bras and hair extensions than anything Father Murphy had to say about grace and salvation.Diana stops scanning the newspaper and turns to him.“Pardon me? What did you say?”Harry feels the sea stir inside him.He briefly closes his eyes, a breakwater against the rushing swell at high tide as the ocean strains for the shore, the image of the girl tumbling then dissolving as a sandcastle might beneath an oncoming wave, as his mother starts again, berating him about his language and everything else.“That’s very nice, Harry.Very nice.A lovely way to speak to your mother.Is that how you talk to Father Murphy? Do you talk like that in church? I don’t know who’s worse, you or your father [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]

Pokrewne