Paddy Clarke Ha Ha Ha читать онлайн

d. She wiped his nose and looked at his eyes for ages and pushed the tears away with her knuckle.–There, there; good boy.I was afraid she’d ask him what was wrong with him and he’d tell her. I rocked the pram the way she always did it.We lit fires. We were always lighting fires.I took off my jumper so there wouldn’t be a smell of smoke off it. It was cold now but that didn’t matter as much. I looked for somewhere clean to put the jumper. We were at the building site. The building site kept changing, the fenced-in part of it where they kept the diggers and the bricks and the shed the builders sat in and drank tea. There was always a pile of bread crusts outside the shed door, huge batch crusts with jam stains on the edges. We were looking through the wire fence at a seagull trying to pick up one of the crusts—it was too long for the seagull’s beak; he should have grabbed it in the middle—when another crust came flying out the shed door and hit the side of the seagull’s head. We heard the roars of the men’s laughing from inside the shed.We’d go down to the building site and it wouldn’t be there any more, just a square patch of muck and broken bricks and tyre marks. There was a new road where there’d been wet cement the last time we were there and the new site was at the end of the road. We went over to where we’d written our names with sticks in the cement, but they’d been smoothed over; they’d gone.–Ah gick, said Kevin.Our names were all around Barrytown, on the roads and paths. You had to do it at night when they were all gone home, except the watchmen. Then when they saw the names in the morning it was too late, the cement was hard. Only our christian names, just in case the builders ever went from door to door up Barry