All That Man Is Read Online Free

aureate beige – is loose and unkempt, and she is wearing a yellow towelling dressing gown and blue plastic sandals. She comes forward over the blossom-thick pavement in her blue sandals, through the shattered shade that leaves flecks of light on her smooth-skinned face, smiling, and sticks a pair of kisses on each of the young visitor’s faces. Then she hurries them inside and shows them to what will be their room – a single bed, a stained foam mattress on the floor, a leaf-filled window. She smiles at them as they take in the room tiredly. ‘Is okay?’ she says.
    She tells them to leave their things there and join her for breakfast, so they follow her along a passage with a washing machine in it, past what seems to be a nasty bathroom, and into a kitchen.
    Simon is still thinking of the dream he had on the train as he follows her into the kitchen with his friend. It seems more present to him than where he is, than the washing machine he has just walked past, than the sunny kitchen where he is being told to sit down.
    the only where I want to be
    She
is doing something now, at this moment,
she
is doing something as he sits down at a small square table in the sunny kitchen. And the smile she showed him in his dream seems realer than the woman now taking things from the fridge and explaining to them why, in opting to stay with her, they have made the right decision.
    The smile she showed him in his dream. It is possible he just inferred it. Her face was not actually smiling. Indeed, it had a serious expression. Pale, framed by her dark hair, it had a serious expression. Yet her doll-blue eyes were dense with tenderness and somehow he knew that she was smiling at him. Then he woke to the first daylight filling out the interior of the train, and the feverish sound of the train’s wheels.
    She says she isn’t interested in money – that isn’t why she takes people in. She just likes people, she says, and wants to help them. She will do everything she can to help them. ‘I will help you,’ she says to them. The house, she admits, is not exactly in the centre of town, but she promises them it isn’t difficult to get there. She will show them how, and while they eat she does, spreading a map on the kitchen table and tracing with her finger the way to the Metro station, though most of the route seems to lie just at the point where the map folds and the paper is worn and illegible.
    They are drinking
slivovice
from little cups the shape of acorns and the air is grey and stinging with cigarette smoke. She is also, as she leans over the tattered, expansive map of Prague with its districts in different colours, being somewhat negligent with her dressing gown, and it is not clear what – if anything – she is wearing underneath it, something that Ferdinand has noticed, and to which he has just tried to draw his friend’s attention with a salacious smile and a movement of his head, when her husband steps in, takes the cigarette out of his small mouth and says something in Czech.
    She tries to shoo him away, not even looking up from what she is doing – tracing something on the map, a sinuous street, with her chipped fingertip – and they have what seems to be a short, fierce dispute.
    Ferdinand is still smiling salaciously.
    She is still leaning over the map.
    Her husband stands there for a moment, simmering with displeasure. Then he leaves, and she tells them he is off to work. He is a former professional footballer, she explains, now a PE teacher.
    She sits down and lights another cigarette and lays a hand on Simon’s knee. (She seems, in spite of his silence, to have taken a particular liking to Simon.) ‘My hahs-band,’ she says, ‘he know
nah-thing
but football.’ There is a pause. Her hand is still on his knee. ‘You understand me?’
    â€˜Yes,’ he says.
    Drinking spirits so early in the morning, and after such a terrible night, has