ugg bailey button A CLOCKWORK ORANGE218rLX

By admin

they’re everywhere in
the coats we use as blankets.We have to search every inch of Alphie’s
body because he’s a baby and helpless.
The lice are worse than the fleas. Lice squat and suck and we can
see our blood through their skins. Fleas jump and bite and they’re clean
and we prefer them.Things that jump are cleaner than things that squat.
We all agree there will be no more stray women and children, dogs
and old men.We don’t want any more diseases and infections.
Michael cries.
Grandma’s next-door neighbor,Mrs. Purcell, has the only wireless in her
lane.The government gave it to her because she’s old and blind. I want
a radio.My grandmother is old but she’s not blind and what’s the use of
having a grandmother who won’t go blind and get a government radio?
Sunday nights I sit outside on the pavement under Mrs. Purcell’s
window listening to plays on the BBC and Radio Eireann, the Irish station.
You can hear plays by O’Casey, Shaw, Ibsen and Shakespeare himself,
the best of all, even if he is English. Shakespeare is like mashed
potatoes, you can never get enough of him. And you can hear strange
plays about Greeks plucking out their eyes because they married their
mothers by mistake.
One night I’m sitting under Mrs.Purcell’s window listening to Macbeth.
Her daughter,ugg bailey button, Kathleen, sticks her head out the door. Come in,
Frankie. My mother says you’ll catch the consumption sitting on the
ground in this weather.
Ah, no, Kathleen. It’s all right.
No. Come in.
They give me tea and a grand cut of bread slathered with blackberry
jam. Mrs. Purcell says, Do you like the Shakespeare, Frankie?
I love the Shakespeare, Mrs. Purcell.
Oh, he’s music, Frankie, and he has the best stories in the world. I
don’t know what I’d do with meself of a Sunday night if I didn’t have
the Shakespeare.
When the play finishes she lets me fiddle with the knob on the
radio and I roam the dial for distant sounds on the shortwave band,
strange whispering and hissing, the whoosh of the ocean coming and
274
going and the Morse Code dit dit dit dot. I hear mandolins, guitars,
Spanish bagpipes, the drums of Africa, boatmen wailing on the Nile. I
see sailors on watch sipping mugs of hot cocoa. I see cathedrals, skyscrapers,
cottages. I see Bedouins in the Sahara and the French Foreign
Legion, cowboys on the American prairie. I see goats skipping along the
rocky coast of Greece where the shepherds are blind because they married
their mothers by mistake. I see people chatting in cafés, sipping
wine, strolling on boulevards and avenues. I see night women in doorways,
monks chanting vespers, and here is the great boom of Big Ben,
This is the BBC Overseas Service and here is the news.
Mrs. Purcell says, Leave that on, Frankie, so we’ll know the state of
the world.
After the news there is the American Armed Forces Network and
it’s lovely to hear the American voices easy and cool and here is the
music, oh, man, the music of Duke Ellington himself telling me take the
A train to where Billie Holiday sings only to me,
I can’t give you anything but love, baby.
That’s the only thing I’ve plenty of, baby.
Oh, Billie, Billie, I want to be in America with you and all that
music, where no one has bad teeth, people leave food on their plates,
every family has a lavatory, and everyone lives happily ever after.
And Mrs. Purcell says,Ugg Chestnut, Do you know what, Frankie?
What, Mrs. Purcell?
That Shakespeare is that good he must have been an Irishman.
The rent man is losing his patience. He tells Mam, Four weeks behind
you are, missus. That’s one pound two shillings. This has to stop for I
have to go back to the office and report to Sir Vincent Nash that the
McCourts are a month behind.Where am I then, missus? Out on my
arse jobless and a mother to support that’s ninety-two and a daily communicant
in the Franciscan church.The rent man collects the rents, missus,Oatmeal ugg,
or he loses the job. I’ll be back next week and if you don’t have the
money, one pound eight shillings and sixpence total, ’tis out on the
pavement you’ll be with the skies dripping on your furniture.
Mam comes back up to Italy and sits by the fire wondering where in
God’s name she’ll get the money for a week’s rent never mind the arrears.
275
She’d love a cup of tea but there’s no way of boiling the water till Malachy
pulls a loose board off the wall between the two upstairs rooms.Mam says,
Well, ’tis off now and we might as well chop it up for the fire.We boil the
water and use the rest of the wood for the morning tea but what about
tonight and tomorrow and ever after? Mam says,One more board from
that wall, one more and not another one. She says that for two weeks till
there’s nothing left but the beam frame. She warns us we are not to touch
the beams for they hold up the ceiling and the house itself.
Oh,we’d never touch the beams.
She goes to see Grandma and it’s so cold in the house I take the
hatchet to one of the beams. Malachy cheers me o