Read Upright Piano Player for Free Online Page B

the crowd into the back of a young man. The man elbowed him hard in the chest.
    “Don’t be silly, I can’t help it—the crowd is pushing me.”
    The young man twisted to look at him. The crowd sweptHenry forward again and he was tight up against the man’s leather jacket. Henry felt a booted heel smash into his shin.
    “Oh, don’t be so infantile”—even as Henry said it, he knew it was the wrong word. The man lowered his head and brought it back hard against the bridge of Henry’s nose. He slumped, head swimming, the pain acute, but he did not fall. The crowd held him upright. There was an illusion of toughness—the man they can’t put down—and then a shift in the crowd and he was on the ground.
    “Back off! Back off! Someone is down!”
    He was dragged onto the pavement and propped against the balustrade. He was aware and embarrassed. People stepped over his outstretched legs, not always successfully. He was just another man who had partied too long, the blood on his face the legacy of a drunken fall. He got slowly to his feet and fumbled for a handkerchief. His forehead was bleeding, but his nose did not seem to be broken.
    By keeping close to the railings, he made it across the bridge. South of the river the walking was easier. The crowds had thinned and he made good progress along the Albert Embankment. Oncoming pedestrians scuttled out of his way. Later, catching his reflection in a shop window, he understood why. His hair, thickened by rain and mud, was a wild halo above a soiled and bloody face. His clothes were dishevelled. He looked like a vagrant with a grudge.
    He had expected to turn north at Lambeth Bridge, but the police had erected yet another barrier. It seemed he had become a competitor in a monstrous obstacle race. He looked over the hurdles at the empty road stretching across the bridge, the first open space he had seen in hours.
    “You’ll have to go down to Vauxhall, that’s the only way you’ll get over the river.” A man with a sleeping child heavy in his arms shrugged at the flat tones of the policeman. Henry wanted to ask why was the bridge closed—what logic from above had deemed it necessary to turn celebrants into refugees, to fuck up the first few hours of the new millennium? Newly cautious, he turned away. He did not imagine that policemen did head-butts, but decided not to risk it.
    On Vauxhall Bridge he saw the first traffic. He was limping and his head hurt. There were still hundreds of people on the pavements and he walked in the gutter, too tired to cope with the minute changes of direction required up there beyond the curb. When the gutter became too cluttered with debris, he stepped out into the road, ignoring the hoots of the cars and the insults of the drivers. He walked, head down, through Victoria and into Eaton Square. It was 3:30 in the morning and his ordeal was not over. On the Fulham Road, a boy and girl bumped into him. They looked no more than fifteen, cold and pinched in their T-shirts, clutching beer cans to their narrow chests. “Happy New Year,” they shouted. Henry ploughed on, saying nothing, close to home now. They followed him. “Well, fuck you, you wanker. Fuck you!” A beer can hit him in the back as he reached his gate.

4
    In Florida, it is hard to find a cautious property developer. Subsidized by the city managers, they fling up shopping malls at breakneck speed, indifferent to the fact that many of the ventures will never cover the city’s costs. The Plaza Delray, however, had been a success; profitable for twenty years, it had only recently shown signs of decline.
    The drugstore and the Italian restaurant had closed and only Jack’s Café, with its white plastic tables grouped under the shade of the two large ficus trees, promised conviviality. True, there was sometimes a bustle inside Rita’s Beauty Parlor—and the dry cleaners did a steady trade, pulling in drivers from Ocean Boulevard, but it wasn’t enough to dispel the feeling