Serious Sweet Read Online Free Page A

or prevent new ones appearing – these proofs of concentrated power, silliness, silly wealth – then you could declare them ridiculous. You could be pleased to hear of their design flaws, their structural defects, their expensively unoccupied floor space. It did no good, but it could make you smile.
    You could try the same with other sections of reality. Sometimes.
    Sometimes the art of naming could subdue hostile territory for a while. She’d once visited a friend – more a friend of friends – in hospital. The room he’d shared with two others had been high enough to peer across Chelsea. Some former inmate had left a meticulous drawing of the landscape, every roof in silhouette, marked across an elongated strip of card. The detail was obsessive. Each building was identified and given historical, or scurrilous, footnotes.
    As she’d had very little she could talk about to her friend’s friend, she’d drifted into remarks about the unknown artist. She’d said that someone must have spent week after week here being very ill, or very bored, or dying and trying to keep useful by leaving a present behind. Her friend’s friend had, at that time, been in the process of dying, although he was taking it well.
    It had been one of those days when her tact had failed her.
    Now she wondered if the Hill could find somebody who would make them all a similar long, thin chart to explain their outlook and keep them right. It would be both useful and appropriate. Insummer, when residents loitered outside in the early hours to smoke, paced on front paths and in gardens, leaned against doorways, sat on steps, then the place did have a hospital atmosphere: slippers and nightgowns, quiet nods in passing, half-awake stares and faces still pillow-creased, soft. They all needed a therapeutic map they could walk up and learn from, alter, perfect, garnish with added footnotes as they wished. It would be a thing of power.
    Or they could go on as they were – half knowing, recognising, deducing.
    Or they could make things up. She could do that. She was good at invention, often unhelpfully so. She could quickly feel definitive and point to Over There and then announce,
That is the listening post that records our affections, there is the confectioner’s workshop devoted to making models of our souls – they do it with spun sugar, souls never purchased, only taken as gifts, or eaten – and that’s the Depository of Regret and there is the doorway to the Furnace, guarded by a clever dog
. She could reel off all sorts of nonsense like this – no worries over whether you wanted it or not.
    In bleak moods, she just would prefer that all the signature constructions, the grand gestures, were rechristened factually: the Shinywank, the Spinywank, the Fatwank, the Flatwank, the Weirdwank, the Overlooked, the Understrength, the Pretty, the Petty, the Squint, and the Sadwank.
    Why not be straightforward?
    But she wasn’t in a bleak mood today. In conversation, she might – it was true – have said, ‘I will meet you under the Spinywank – right beside the station.’ But she’d only have meant it in fun. She might even have thought it, but kept quiet. She would have been able to remember that some people don’t appreciate terms like
wank
and so she would have waited and had a thinkthinkthink, checked to discover if she ought to skip the cheap laugh and be more standard-issue instead. That way you wouldn’t cause offence. Although you might discover later that non-habitual swearers were up for it on some occasions and pleased by bad words from others when the time was right. Hard to tell by looking. You had to test the waters without drowning, slip ingently for a bit of a dip. To be cautious, then, she might have said, ‘I will meet you on Friday, right next to the tower – at London Bridge Station.’ And added no