Die Like a Dog Read Online Free Page A

We’re a very small community but not isolated, not inward-looking. A lot happens here, you know: people ask what we find to do in the winter-time but –’ she gave a little false laugh, ignoring the man who was glowering at her, ‘– in fact we can’t wait for the summer to finish so that we can get down to the business of living – and knowing each other again instead of just making money.’
    Miss Pink, aware that her stare had become fixed, looked at the man to see if he would argue the point.
    â€˜Summer gets a bit heated,’ he said inanely.
    It was a pathetic bit of by-play to make her stop asking questions about Alsatians, but the woman had rather more wit than her husband. There was a sound of tyres on gravel and a boy propped a bicycle against the window and stepped into the shop. At sight of Miss Pink he paused and the excitement in his face faded. Suddenly he was dull, oafish, and Miss Pink’s mind sharpened.
    â€˜Don’t prop your bike against the glass, Dewi,’ the woman said, long-suffering.
    â€˜You’ve been told a dozen times.’ The man showed a flicker of temper.
    â€˜Sorry, Dad.’
    The boy slouched outside. There was a gentle sigh from behind the counter. Miss Pink indicated a poster in fluorescent red in the window.
    â€˜Do you think this show will be worth going to?’
    â€˜Why, yes.’ The woman’s eyes shone. ‘She came here; that’s a girl: M. Seale. She put the poster up herself. She’s travelled all over the world. She’s a rock climber. She lives in a tent! Can you imagine that – just like a gypsy? Although she lives in America most of the time – in California.’
    â€˜You don’t know that,’ the man said. ‘You’ve only got her word for it.’
    His wife ignored him. She was staring at the mountains above their forested plinth across the valley.
    â€˜She said women have more sense of adventure than men,’ she said softly.
    He gave a guffaw of angry laughter and Miss Pink turned in some embarrassment to find the oafish boy in the doorway, his head cocked like a blackbird’s, a wry smile on his lips. But even as she turned, his jaw dropped and he asked dozily: ‘Tea ready, Mam?’
    The lecture hall was a small wooden building boasting the bare necessities: a few tubular steel chairs, a power point, and dark curtains that only just met in the middle. Despite the postmistress’s contention that everything happened in this valley, the community must have been starved of live entertainment for they had turned out in force; about seventy of them, Miss Pink calculated, but then she noticed a tattered hair style in orange and lime and realised that Seale had attracted some visitors too.
    Richard Judson was across the aisle from her and he introduced his wife, a large, plain woman upon whom the name of Pink appeared to make no impression. No one said anything about dogs. She couldn’t see the Warings; no doubt they were occupied at the Bridge, although their cook was present, a woman so far only glimpsed through a doorway as she shouted at a diminutive coloured man: ‘Sour cream, yer daft bugger; sour cream!’
    Miss Pink recalled the name: Lucy Banks. She had turned in her seat to chat with Noreen Owen, the woman at the Post Office. Mrs Owen and her companions looked somewhat self-conscious at being the focus of Lucy Banks’s attention but they had little choice unless they moved.
    The cook was quite elderly but very well preserved, with raven hair coiled massively and held in place by diamanté combs. A deep tan was set off by a low-cut frock like a green skin and she had a throaty Lancashire accent in which, at this moment, she was telling everyone within a twenty-foot radius how to stuff guinea fowl.
    There was an eruption of scuffling and furious cries from a tangle of small boys in the front row, subsiding momentarily as Handel Evans –