Read Bishop's Man for Free Online Page B

said.

    “Effie got it from John when they split up. She gave it to me.”

    “Did you know that Uncle Sandy used to have a picture of Gracie Fields, from the same time, just before they went overseas? I wonder where that one got to? It was autographed. It’s probably worth something now. On the back of it she wrote: Wish me luck as you wave me goodbye. Then her name. Scrawled, but you could make it out, clear as anything.”

    “I didn’t know.”

    “I always wondered where he got that. There was a man, eh, Uncle Sandy. It wouldn’t surprise me if he took a run at old Gracie. You remember how he was?”

    “Oh, yes.”

    “And look at himself, my old man. Poor old Jack.” He shook his head. “They didn’t have a clue. But then again …”

    “I didn’t know that you were coming home.”

    “I meant to call,” he said, and smiled. “You know the way it is, how time goes.”

    “I know.”

     
    Now that I’m in middle age, the nights are always difficult, I find. I toss my body into various positions, awaiting sleep, but I just grow more alert. When I do sleep, my dreams persuade me that I’m still awake. I tell myself perhaps I need pills. Sextus said he took medication for a while for sleeplessness. Said it’s very common at our age. Especially in times of stress. And of course the stress increases with the weight of years. But he won’t take medication anymore and has started smoking pot instead. Said he can get it for me, any time. It’s everywhere in town. Better for you in the long run, he said.

    I smoked pot once. Alfonso had it. Where he got it, I have no idea. I remember laughing a lot, an innocent hysteria. Lying here alone, swathed in the damp silence of the old house, I think of Alfonso as frequently as I think of Jack and Sandy Gillis and my father. What goes through our heads when suddenly we have to face the inevitable? Death imposed, or death chosen? Occasionally the questions drive me out of bed, to get up and get out to try to shake the feeling of despair. At the end of life, I wonder, how much comfort, really, is belief? Did it help them?

    Sometimes I’ll shuffle to the bathroom, study the face in the mirror, now baggy-eyed, skin sere and thin. Soon throat and chin will become one continuum of sagging flesh. The ravages of half a century expose themselves at night. Time, the vampire, sucks away the juice of youth while we’re asleep. I can imagine the women from our earnest little meetings, and see them in such solitary moments. In their mirrors. In their husbands’ eyes. The night and time are harder on the women.

    The women named me Pelirrojo.

    The red hair now has a dusty look to it, fading like everything else. Bulging flab below the rib cage. And it gets worse from here on. After fifty.

    dec. 16. alfonso nagging me again today about my spanish, or lack of it. says i’m useless here without it. the only word you’ve learned, he said, is pelirrojo. i’m going to hand you over to jacinta. gracias, i said. worse things could happen to me.

    The doctor once told me: Don’t just lie there. Get up. Do something. And on many nights that summer I would follow his advice, leave the house for the damp, cool air outside, the fragrance of the mountain. The sea would whisper as I made my way through darkness to the silent church to kneel before the bank of candles. And I would think of Jacinta, wondering where she was. And pray to Alfonso, remembering his fate. Wondering what, if anything, went through his mind.

    jacinta works at the hospital. she is a specialist in malnutrition and works with children. pretty in a modest way. very dark hair accentuates the green of the eyes. the kids are something else. sorrowful, silent, dark, empty faces, gap-toothed, snot-encrusted noses. thin hair the colour of clay. scab-encrusted scalps. ribs sticking through tissue-flimsy skin. you wonder how they get like that. jacinta will teach me to speak spanish … fluently, alfonso said.

    Jacinta.