Read The Kiln for Free Online Page B

it is. You are a total cracker.’
    She came across and handed him the bag.
    ‘I put things in.’
    ‘Thank you, Princessa.’
    He dropped the bag on the bed and, as he turned back, he noticed the self-containment of her standing there. He felt the utter wonder of her presence and he lifted her up and spun her in the air, laughing. She was smiling calmly. He set her down on the floor.
    ‘Is that all?’ she said.
    ‘Well. Ah suppose it'll have to do. Where's Gus?’
    She shrugged and walked out.
    He picked up the toilet-bag. He smiled at how well Megan had done. Then he noticed that she had also included Gill's L'Air du Temps. He laughed to himself and put the perfume on the window-ledge. He looked at the open suitcase. Was that enough? He could never tell. At least he had his one formal suit in it. Just in case. Just in bloody case. He thought of taking the suit back out, for packing it felt like signing the death certificate already. You should never welcome the bad stuff. If it wanted to come in, let it beat the door down. No. The suit stayed. Superstition doesn't change the rules, it just lets you refuse to learn them. You have to learn them. Would he ever learn them?
    He crossed to the window and looked out at Grenoble. He fingered the bottle of L'Air du Temps. Perhaps Megan thought his uncertainty about himself extended to gender. Or did she see him as inhabiting the same not quite reachable place of certainty where he had sensed his own father to be? He hoped not. He hoped it was different for girls. He hoped it would be different for Gus, too. He hadn't even been able to tell his father about Cran, though he had wanted to.
    Two feelings had held him back, instinctively. The first wasthat it seemed unmanly. He was seventeen and had left school. He should be able to look after himself - too late to run home from the playground, picking hardened blood from your nostrils, to receive from your mother the sweet solace that the rest of the world is wrong and a plate of tattie soup that warms your insides like ointment for the soul, to receive from your father advice on the politics of fear and kitchen lessons on how to deliver a good left hook. There had to come a time when the womb was shut, owing to the fact of your being too big for effective re-entry. It was a pity, though.
    The second was, paradoxically, that his father would have understood Cran and the cavernous brutishness where so much of his nature seemed to reside, littered with the bones of dead compassion. For part of his father, too, lived in those shadows. The very fact that his father would have recognised Cran, though he had never met him, had created in his mind a bond between the two men, one which excluded him. Somehow he must have sensed that you didn't gain admission to that dark brotherhood by invitation. You had to earn it for yourself. Somehow he had come to know it was his father most of all who blocked the entrance, shaking his head, acknowledging his own powerlessness to let Tam pass, implying with every spontaneous gesture of his nature that the only way past him was through him.
    (There is a code of rules here I didn't make and don't control, he seemed to be saying, and the core of the code is this: no entry but by the force of your own nature. I will offer help but it will be weirdly codified help and it's down to you to crack the code. Take me on and win your entry. Don't and stay outside.)
    IT IS SUNDAY MORNING
    HE LIES AWAKE IN MICHAEL AND MARION'S BED , luxuriating. (As usual on a Saturday night, they have beenstaying at Marion's mother's.) He reflects on his talent for long, deep sleeps. He can do this even in the living-room with noise all around him. (‘If sleep wis brains, son,’ his father has said, not without a hint of jealousy, ‘you'd be a genius.’) He thinks of the girl he took home from the dancing last night. Marilyn Miller. It was pleasant - bruised lips and delicate adumbration of firm breasts. He has discovered the