(2005) Rat Run
“Then Malachy had slept.
He was curled on the living-room floor, his breathing regular. No dreams to toss him. On the carpet, he was a fallen statue. If he had dreamed it would have been of old Cloughie, sixth-form history, the romantic, who broke up the Thirty Years War or the Industrial Revolution or the Rise of Parliament with un-connected poetry. Sometimes Tennyson, more frequently Keats or Shelley. Hunched, as if broken by exhaustion, he lay without a cushion at his head. If old Cloughie ha...d been with him on level three, block nine, his surrogate parent would have found the relevant passage Near them on the sand, Half sunk, a shattered visage lies, whose frown, And wrinkled lip, and sneer of cold command, Tell that its sculptor well those passions read, Which yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things, and would have recited in his falsetto tone, shrill with excitement. But he did not dream. The images were gone, lost under the shifting sand - he slept deep.
He was naked.
The vagrant's clothing was back in the bin-liner, under the bed in the next room with what remained of the tape, the rope and the plastic toy.MoreLess
He was curled on the living-room floor, his breathing regular. No dreams to toss him. On the carpet, he was a fallen statue. If he had dreamed it would have been of old Cloughie, sixth-form history, the romantic, who broke up the Thirty Years War or the Industrial Revolution or the Rise of Parliament with un-connected poetry. Sometimes Tennyson, more frequently Keats or Shelley. Hunched, as if broken by exhaustion, he lay without a cushion at his head. If old Cloughie ha...d been with him on level three, block nine, his surrogate parent would have found the relevant passage Near them on the sand, Half sunk, a shattered visage lies, whose frown, And wrinkled lip, and sneer of cold command, Tell that its sculptor well those passions read, Which yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things, and would have recited in his falsetto tone, shrill with excitement. But he did not dream. The images were gone, lost under the shifting sand - he slept deep.
He was naked.
The vagrant's clothing was back in the bin-liner, under the bed in the next room with what remained of the tape, the rope and the plastic toy.MoreLess
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