Mountains of the Moon Read Online Free

sit down; imagine that I can see my bones in X-ray over the stove’s blue flame. Out of the corner of my eye I see the woman in the mirror, flitting backward and forward to the window, like Madam fucking Butterfly.
    “Sit. Down,” I say to her.
    A car door slams.
    She doesn’t listen. Techno music drones through the floor. Peter hasn’t forgotten her birthday; he’s never known when it is. There’s a heavy knock on the door. The woman in the mirror goes.
    “You want number 24,” I hear her say.
    I should write to Irene and give her my new address. I light a candle to see. My life—in a shoebox; I empty the contents on to the floor. I don’t own a photograph. With the apartment comes evidence that I exist: I must be real, I’ve got a tenancy agreement and the first lot of paid bills. I feel my ear for the butterfly, get just the smooth lobe. I’ve got a folded one-pound note. I’ve got Irene’s letters; beautiful handmade papers with flower petals pressed in them, tore a corner off one once and ate it. Her letters came from Scotland first, then America, Australia and Japan. I sniff at the bundle of letters, don’t know if the perfume is still there but the idea of it fills me up.
    I don’t know why Irene kept on. She didn’t believe the verdict when none of the jurors had a doubt. At first I didn’t trust the kindness in the letters; she always asked for a visiting order but I thought she might attack me. Eventually I came to wish that she would attack me and requested a visiting order for her. But then, after all those years, when she came I was concussed, in the hospital wing. Women hunt in packs, like wild dogs, there was something not right about me being there.
    A warden took me in a wheelchair. I’d always imagined wire mesh and glass screens, but the visiting suite was a big hall, with spaced out tables.My mind caught on a thread of scent; it was clean, intensifying, glorious. I knew it. I closed my eyes, went chasing after fluttering names through scented fields of memory.
    “She’s not all that coherent,” somebody said.
    I looked across the table; saw a posy of spring flowers that formed into a face.
    “Lily of the Valley,” I said.
    It made me cry.
    “Visitor, sit back down, please,” the warden ordered. “Sit back down.”
    “No.” A pink lady with a lacy collar was kneeling down holding my hands.
    “Let go, please,” they ordered. “Let go.”
    “No.”
    “Let go.” It had a final tone.
    “No,” she said. “I will not let go.”
    They lifted Irene up and away, her legs pedaled in mid-air.
    “Put me down,” I heard her say. But she must have ducked back under their arms because I saw her little forget-me-not eyes. I looked down; saw my palm and her wrist pressed swirling against mine.
    “Yardley,” she called. “Lily
of the Va-lley
!”
    It was faint, from a long, long time ago. But it was sweet and it lingered.
    It lingered.
    Dear Irene, I think she imagines what she wants to see. She must be seventy now, more, seventy-five. She had Quentin really late in life. A shaman is working with him now.

    “If that’s Grandad tell him to fuck off.”
    That’s how come when we got the phone in I had to answer it. It was always Auntie Fi, or Uncle Ike looking for Auntie Fi. The one time it was Grandad I wasn’t ready. He said, “Is that little Lulu?” I said, “Yes.” Hesaid, “Is that the African Queen of the Mountains of the Moon?” Don’t know how come I started crying.
Grandad, Grandad,
Mum said, in my voice cept smaller. There was only one word for it:
Path-e-tic
and
Dis-loy-al.
After we looked them up in the dictionary Mum wrote
Judas
with her finger in the steamed-up back-room winder. I climbed up on a chair to write it underneath. Especial lesson, case I forget, and it don’t matter how long it takes, she does me with words til I drop. And she still int talking to them.
    “Just ring the doorbell and wait on the doorstep.”
    The hospital shaved a lump of her