Read Talking to Strange Men for Free Online

filmtogether at the Astoria and if she looks keen you just say, How about tomorrow evening then? I’ll call for you, shall I?
    Her expression was a little puzzled because he was staring at her. Quickly he looked away, turned back to the shelves. He didn’t want to go out with her, it would be boring and embarrassing. And he would end up telling her about Jennifer. My wife’s former fiancé turned up out of the blue and she went off with him. Poor you, how awful for you. But she would be embarrassed too, not knowing what to say. He sometimes thought he would never be alone with another woman for as long as he lived. The books were heavy but he made a detour to cats’ green just the same. A thin kitten, white with tabby patches, was sitting in the grass at the foot of the central pillar. It retreated a little, mewing, when John came up. He didn’t dare touch it in case it started him off coughing and sneezing. The message had gone from inside the upright but a strip of tape remained, one end still stuck to the metal.
    It had been a better day than when he was last here. The clocks would go forward on Saturday night and then you would really feel spring had come. There was already a hint of warmth in the air, what his father would have called a balminess, though that sounded strange to John, as if the weather had gone mad. A blue sky showed between the flocks of cloud and from the end of the alley next to the disused church he saw the glint of water. He had walked down here almost without knowing it. A young woman was pushing a child in a pram in the direction of Albatross Street but otherwise there was no one. She was going John’s way and it would have been natural for him to follow her but then he thought, it might scare her to have a man walking behind her. It’s a bit rough down here and not another soul about. He turned in the opposite direction, heading straight for the embankment and river walk, and found himself suddenly, almost before he knew it, at the head of the Beckgate Steps where Cherry’s body had been found.
    Immediately it came to him that he had told himself he would know the place by a kind of instinct or intuition, no matter how it had changed. Well, it had changed, it hadchanged unrecognizably, only the broad flight of ancient steps remaining as they had always been. The red-brick chapel had gone and the ruined maltings been rebuilt, the huddle of Victorian cottages transformed into a wholesale clothes place and the once-derelict pub refurbished and renamed – and he had not known it. But the steps were the same and the remoteness and the quiet, for the wholesaler’s was closed for the evening and the pub not yet open.
    At the foot of the steps, beyond the stone-flagged embankment, the river glittered with innumerable wavelets. A segment of it only could be seen with the further bank beyond, trees on that side and blocks of expensive flats with protuberant balconies on every floor. The sun was shining but no sunlight penetrated to the double flight of shallow dark steps. They were made of some kind of black and grey mottled stone those steps, and with an iron railing on each side, polished to silver by the hands of those who descended. He felt a nervous clutching sensation in the region of his heart. He knew his face had contorted, that he had screwed up his eyes, and he was glad there was no one to see him. It was sixteen years since he had been here. All that time he had lived no more than a mile away but he had never returned to this spot. It was right to do so now, he felt that. He couldn’t shy away from it for ever.
    Slowly, holding on to the gleaming handrail, he made his way down the steps to the bottom of the first flight. For it was on this ten-foot-long break in the staircase or landing, so to speak, not on the steps proper that Cherry had been found. Two weeks afterwards, when the steps were open to the public once more, when the police barriers had