Wow! eBook
Four New Words for Love
Author(s): Michael Cannon (Author)
- Publisher: Freight Books
- Publication Date: June 1, 2014
- Language: English
- Print length: 232 pages
- ISBN-10: 1908754249
- ISBN-13: 9781908754240
Book Description
A charming, deeply moving portrait of an unlikely friendship between a well-to-do widower and a young homeless woman that helps both overcome their tainted pasts and rediscover happiness
Christopher is a decent, elderly, suburban Londoner learning to live again after his release from a loveless marriage following the death of his wife. By chance he meets Gina, a young homeless woman from Glasgow, on Waterloo Bridge. With newfound spontaneity, he offers her a room for the night, and there begins an unlikely platonic friendship between two people from opposite ends of the country, both geographically and socially. Gina has left behind a life devoid of opportunity and a dark tragedy, and slowly, under Christopher’s protection, she re-finds her confidence. But a casual remark shatters their fragile domestic idyll, forcing Christopher to leave London and travel to Glasgow’s mean streets to find and be reconciled with his new friend. This is a beautifully crafted portrait of two damaged lives from different ends of the social spectrum who are both seeking release from the mistakes and thwarted potential of the past. Michael Cannon demonstrates a masterful restraint and boundless empathy in his development of two unforgettable characters attempting to change their lives.
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About the Author
Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.
Four New Words for Love
By Michael Cannon
Freight Books
Copyright © 2013 Michael Cannon
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-908754-24-0
CHAPTER 1
PART 1
Nick didn’t take long. Quick Nick. I lay back and thought of Eng … I’ve no particular reason for thinking about Nick at this particular time. I’m in the flat, with Lolly. She’s rolling her third spliff. The air’s layered with strata of smoke, turned rust coloured in the late light. You can puncture two layers just standing. I don’t touch the stuff but people have become passive addicts just being around her. With Lolly there’s always a danger of proximity.
Sometimes I feel I don’t actually have thoughts in this place, I encounter them, suspended in this haze. But then that sounds like the kind of intellectual wank you hear from students on the top deck of buses, putting the non-matriculated world to rights with their annoyingly loud voices.
Lolly’s got two speeds: dead-stop lethargy and high-octane hustle. Both infect people around her in some way. I’m the only one here to bear the effect of tonight’s sloth. It takes me all the effort I can manage to stand up and walk to the window. It’s getting on for the magic minute. I always stand here and watch it, weather permitting. The sun’s cast an oblong of light on the opposite wall, catching Lolly in its passing. She keeps herself air-hostess orange. Her colour looks even more ridiculous in the bronze rectangle. Either it’s the passive dope or she’s radiating some kind of inner light, like a catechism picture of the Holy Ghost, sweating piety. Maybe there’s more to her than meets the eye. But that’s rubbish. There’s exactly as much to Lolly as meets the eye and she spends a lot of effort making sure men spend a lot of time taking the sight in. She’s got hips to breed gladiators and breasts like missile silos. She’s got a theory of fat women. Some women are dumpy fat, some gloomy fat, some shy fat, some aggressively fat and some, very few, are erotically fat. There’s no mistaking Lolly’s category. She aims her breasts at men and they surrender. I don’t know if it’s got to do with genes or attitude, but it hardly ever fails. Maybe her reputation adds to her attraction. I can’t say I understand it. But in a way I do. If I’m depressed I’ll rest my head against her chest, and it’s got the same effect as wrapping yourself in a duvet that’s been blown dry in the fresh air.
She’s put the spliff to one side and turned her attention to the camera. I groan. She insists I sit on the sofa. Every time something happens, or doesn’t, she takes a picture of us. She’s got shoe boxes of those stamp-sized photos you get in booths, black and white graduating to what passes as colour of the two of us, faces squashed together or at the wrong height because the seat won’t screw up or down, cataloguing our reckless Saturdays through boiling puberty and beyond. She’s always saying we should pour them on the carpet and sort them out. I don’t think so. I usually deflect her attention. It isn’t hard. I’m thinking of history. She’s talking nostalgia. If you don’t know the difference it can be fatal. She doesn’t know the difference. I don’t have the energy to explain. She doesn’t have the attention span to listen.
I get crushed as she sits beside me. She leans forward to put on the autotimer. I get the full heft of her breasts in my neck. She’s got no sense of private space, and I’m not just talking about rubbing her tits into the back of strangers on the tube. When I started to cry in the cinema toilets it was Lolly who kicked the door in and snatched the thing from my hand. We watched the line appear. ‘Try another,’ she ordered. You only get one in the pack. I sat crying on the
