Jarrod
Jarrod was pleased that he hadn’t been seen.
He remained seated, gazing across at the night clothes
she would have expected him to have been wearing. He was certain that the jeans
would have sparked a little intrigue, if nothing else.
It had been important to register his disapproval. He had
made it clear that he was a light sleeper and the fact that he wasn’t actually
sleeping didn’t make her any less at fault. A sin’s a sin.
He parted his lips and whispered Milton into the room
before him: ‘Of Man’s first disobedience
and the fruit of that forbidden tree whose mortal taste brought death into the
world and all our woe’
26 lines. That was the challenge. For now, he’d be happy
with 3. Greater men than he had stopped at 2 – he was sure of it – and so 3 was
a perfectly adequate achievement. Commit another 23 to memory and he would be
on the phone to Guinness, demanding inclusion in this year’s record books.
He would name-drop Milton during lunch, intrigued to see
how Dawn would respond to a reference to the rhythmic structure that had held
him enthralled the night before. The eyebrow-raise would provide satisfying
accompaniment for his ham sandwich.
By 5.30 he had reached Line 5, with only the occasional
stutter. Less than a fifth of the way there.
He sighed. Mathematics brought unwanted clarification of
one’s limitations.
And English brought
unexpected awareness of one’s freedoms.
The nearest pen was a full five feet away. He would remember
it.
*
Despite the serenity in his voice, Jarrod had in fact
been a little puzzled by Dawn’s tea-making. He had stood for 30 seconds before
he spoke, his eyes caught between the clasped tea-bag and the droopy eyes
peering at the barely-filled kettle. There was lifelessness in her posture that
betrayed the 7am Dawn he was used to observing. She was an exhibit of
unwillingness. If Madame Tussauds ever came a-calling, this would not be the
pose she’d want to preserve.
He chose his words carefully. An observation and a
reminder in one.
‘You’re making tea.’
He smiled for the duration of the journey back to man’s disobedience waiting face-down on
the corner-chair of his lowly-lit room. He had obeyed his instinct and, in a
way, had therefore shared a crucial experience with Milton’s Satan.
Jarrod’s eyes lingered over the row of identical spines
neatly arranged in alphabetised ascendency. Apart from Joyce, of course, whose Dubliners lived encased, not within the
accustomed faded yellow that identified Penguin’s insistence on uniformity but
rather within an off-white that belied any impression of purity in his writing.
It had been possible, he assumed, to find a version that conformed to the
colour of the canon but there was something rather fittingly contradictory
about Joyce portraying himself as a taller, purer force, and so Jarrod had
resolved to accept the disturbance, however uncomfortable it made him feel.
His eyes skipped jauntily through the lines he was
supposed to have committed to the cavernous memory he was sure he possessed,
considering that perhaps reading the lines backwards would assist him in his
challenge. After all, isn’t that how professional proofreaders did it? And
there certainly was something strangely satisfying about the notion that he was
proofreading Milton.
He
reached inside his left pocket and withdrew a slightly blunted pencil.
---------
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