Serious Sweet Read Online Free

choice. The open dark had given her a clifftop feeling as soon as she came within sight of the big skyline. It provided the good illusion that she could step off from here and go kicking into space, swimming on and up. Below her, opened and spread, were instants and chains of light apparently hung in a vast nowhere, a beautiful confusion. It was easy to assume that London’s walls and structures had proved superfluous, been let go, and that only lives, pure lives, were burning in mid-air, floating as stacks of heat, or colour, perhaps expressions of will. What might be supporting the lives, you couldn’t tell.
    Then, during the course of an hour, the sun had indeed pressed in at the east, risen, birds had woken and announced the fact, as had aeroplanes and buses, and the world had solidified and shut her back out. It was like a person. You meet someone at night and they won’t be the same as they will if you see them in daytime. Under thestill-goldenish, powdery sky, buildings had become just buildings, recognisably Victorian in the foreground and repeating to form busy furrows, their pattern interrupted where bombs had fallen in the war. These explosive absences had then been filled with newer and usually uglier structures, or else parks. There were also areas simply left gapped. They had been damaged and then abandoned, allowed to become tiny wildernesses, gaps of forgotten cause. Rockets had hit in ’44 – V-1s and V-2s. Somewhere under the current library – which wasn’t council any more – there’d been a shattered building and people in pieces, dozens of human beings torn away from life in their lunch hour. It didn’t show. There was a memorial plaque if you noticed, but other human beings, not obviously in pieces, would generally walk past it and give it no thought.
    She was the type, though, to give it thought. She had an interest in damages, you might say: damages and gaps. They could both be educational.
    Other places were more peaceable. She could pick out church spires and the cream-coloured Battersea chimneys of what had been the power station. Further off, thin trains pushed themselves to unseen destinations and details blurred. The far distance raised up shapes, or hints, or dreams of impossible coasts, lagoons and mountains. Mirages crept out from under the horizon. And somewhere, the crumpled shape of the Thames hunched along invisibly towards the coast.
    It wasn’t a bad morning. She wasn’t a morning person, but she could still like it. The parakeets were lively already and sleeking about, flaring to a halt and alighting, an alien green that never was here before, bouncing and head cocking in dull trees. They were something from the mirage country beyond the rooftops. Initially, there’d only been a pair of them on the Hill, but two was all it ever took – think of Noah. One plus one equals more. They were teaching the magpies bad words.
    By this point – almost seven o’clock on an April Friday – the standard architectural landmarks were on offer: the complicated metallic cylinder rising up near Vauxhall, the vast stab of glass at London Bridge, the turbines rearing uneasily over Elephant andCastle, the shape of a well-turned banister marking Fitzrovia … each of the aids to navigation. And then there was the toy-box clutter of the City, a slapdash collection of unlikely forms, or the vaguely art deco confections at Canary Wharf and, dotted about, the distant filaments of cranes that would lift more empty peculiarities into the undefended sky.
    These were the self-conscious monuments of confident organisations and prominent men – everyone of less significance was forced to look at them and reflect. Insignificant people gave them nicknames purposely comparing this or that noble edifice to a pocket-sized object, a domestic item: mobile phone, cheese grater, gherkin. If you couldn’t make them go away,