Read The Fever Tree and Other Stories for Free Online

cries.
    â€˜Ask the foreman,’ said John.
    â€˜He won’t bloody know.’ And Gilly lifted on to his lap the bronze that was nearly nude, just veiled over her loins with metal drapery. ‘Randy old devil, he must have been, that Sidney George Whatsit, having her sitting on top of him when he was dead.’
    â€˜He was a historian, the plaque says,’ said John. ‘She’s supposed to be Clio, the Muse of History. That’s why she’s got a scroll in her hand.’ And then, because he was bored with Gilly and afraid for Marlon, ‘Let’s stick them all in the chapel till the council guy comes.’
    But Gilly refused to abandon the huge joke of caressing the bronze. Every reachable inch of her anatomy was examined until, suddenly, he jumped up, leaving her to roll into one of the muddy ruts the truck had made, and ran up to the pillared monument from whose dome she had toppled. He stood inside, a satyr, John thought, in a temple defiled by northern rains. He threw up his arms.
    â€˜I said you was a randy old goat, Sidney, and so you was! I had a bird called Clio once myself, real hot stuff.’ His shouts punctured the thick greyness, the silence, the fog-textured air. He leapt down the steps, kicking a gravestone here, a marble urn there, and perched on a broken column. ‘Come out, all the lot of you, if you want, only you can’t because you’re bloody dead!’
    And then Marlon made a horrible sound, the moan a man makes in sleep, in a nightmare, when he thinks he is screaming. He got into the cab of the truck and hunched there.
    â€˜You stupid bastard.’ John picked up Marlon’s fallen cigarette packet, brushed the grit off it. ‘D’you have to act like a kid of ten?’
    â€˜Got to get some sort of kick out of this dump,’ Gilly said sulkily. ‘Dead-end hole.’
    â€˜Well, that’s what it is, isn’t it? What d’you expect? A bar? Booze? Bring on the dancing girls?’
    Gilly started to laugh again, picked up his muse again. ‘I wouldn’t mind this dancing girl. Don’t reckon they’d miss her, do you? She’d look O.K. in my place. I could stand her on the table.’
    â€˜What for?’
    â€˜People have statues, don’t they? They’ve got them in the town hall. It’d give my place a bit of class.’
    â€˜Come on,’ said John, ‘let’s stick the lot of them in the chapel. The foreman’ll do his nut if he sees you going off with that. She’s too big to go under your jacket.’
    So they piled the statues and the urns in the chapel, and Gilly amused himself by shouting insults and obscenities which the lofty walls echoed back at him, black pigeons, white doves flapping from the crannies in fear.
    â€˜What d’you do in that room of yours, John? Must be a real drag all on your own night after night. Fancy coming over to my bird’s place? She’s got a real dishy friend. We could have ourselves a ball, and I don’t mean wining and dining.’
    No, thanks, John said, and softened his refusal by saying he had to study which impressed Gilly. It wasn’t that he was a prude so much as that the idea of association with Gilly’s friends offended some snobbish delicacy in his nature, some fastidiousness. Better the speechless company of James Calhoun Stokes and Angelina Bowyer and the historian, better, in the evenings, the dreams of them and the wonderings about their lost lives. Though, in refusing, he thought it likely that brash insensitive Gilly might not take his no for an answer but turn up one night with his girl and that other girl to rout him out. He feared it a little, but not with Marlon’s obsessional dread of threats from another world.
    When at last Gilly did come, it was on a cold moonlit night, and he came alone.
    â€˜I’m going to split,’ said Gilly, ‘I’m getting the hell out. All good things come