On Chasing Brad Through Purgatory Read Online Free Page A

let down and lost and helpless. And all because some schmuck had called her father a bastard. Dear God look after her.
    Part of me, undoubtedly a part which needed to grow up, provided for her a young airport official, handsome and unattached and caring, who would tactfully take control. Man made in God’s own image. During slack periods at work—I’d worked on the reception desk of a small hotel in Uckfield—I sometimes used to read romantic novels; even, despite the teasing, Mills & Boon. I’d claim these made a change from heavier things like Gide and Kafka and Joyce and Pasternak though no one at the hotel ever saw me with Gide or Kafka or Joyce or Pasternak. (But you did Brad. You did. Sorry if in the end I had to return each time to the more lightweight stuff and never let you know.) But please God. Just for Suzanne. This once. You ever read a Mills & Boon?
    (Daft question. The million times you must have helped to write one.)
    The association of ideas inevitably brought into my mind Sebastian and Sally and Laura. Gosh would the three of them be shaken! Imagining this, made me almost laugh again. Oh to be a fly on the wall—my grandmother’s reiterated wish—when somehow the news got through to The White Hart! I reflected that throughout their lives they’d fleetingly remember me, those three; remember me as bright-eyed, blond and sexy and always in tiptop physical condition. Not bad, that; there were certain consolations in nearly everything; although I knew I shouldn’t care.
    I supposed I’d soon be seeing my grandmother. The prospect didn’t thrill me. “Don’t do this … don’t do that … I’d have hoped you would have learned by now!” My chief remembrance of her. Negatives.
    Yet now the thought came rushing: I had no right to mimic her as cruelly as I did. Admittedly, only in front of my brothers and sisters but not merely before she’d died—even afterwards as well. Soon afterwards. And with the same total lack of understanding. I wished I’d never done it. I really wished I’d never done it.
    Something else, not simply a thought, that came rushing on me just as unexpectedly: that bend in the road where the bark of a massive lone oak was jaggedly damaged near its base—the naked wood savagely indented; where there were tyre marks on the verge, and bits of broken glass among the fallen leaves.
    Yet that was all. They had removed the Porsche with commendable efficiency; I briefly wondered where. Less briefly I wondered where they had taken the body of its driver. Most likely to the same place where they had taken mine; or now were taking it. But what would happen to us after that?
    Of course if I had an actual preference we would both be buried side-by-side in the nearby peaceful pretty churchyard—St Leonard’s which I had from time to time attended—with a gravestone common to the pair of us; but even if there’d been room in the churchyard and the coupling of male lovers on a single stone could now at last be countenanced there still remained the problem that Brad had been a non-believer. I would willingly have gone with him to the nearest cemetery, naturally, though the nearest cemetery couldn’t start to compare aesthetically with the churchyard at St Leonard’s but I had never made a will—what had I to leave?—I didn’t know if Brad had either, and never having discussed with any of our friends or family the issue of interment as opposed to cremation (had Brad ever done so in the days before I knew him?), I now wasn’t at all sure where any of this muddle finally left us or whether indeed—
    Oh Christ!
    Brad wasn’t a believer.
    How could I have forgotten? How could I have overlooked that glaringly important point?
    He had been such a good man.
    God! God! God! He was such a good man. A dozen times better than me. More! Oh Lord you can’t refuse him his salvation