MORNING SERIAL
“ANY kind of placard or slogan in front of the band would clash with Moira in that fine romantic costume of hers. But the slogan you’ve just mentioned would put the judges out for the count. We’ll have to rely on the goodwill of Matlock and the others. We’ll have to convince them that through these carnivals we are now making our way towards the New Jerusalem by a blither route, thinking no thought that cannot be played on a gazooka. Now, that’s enough defeatist talk for one morning. I’m going to get a new rose for Moira. She makes a wonderful picture with that flower hanging from her lips.”
Gomer looked around. The only dwelling on that part of the road was an old cottage in which lived an ancient couple, secluded and somewhat petulant, still closer in spirit to the peasantry of the distant country of their origin than to the loud beetle-browed valleys where they had come tetchily to settle.
If they had seen any of the carnivals’ bands pass their cottage they had probably taken them as being quite seriously a part of the crudescent lunacy they had always spotted at the heart of the life around them.
In the front garden of the cottage were hundreds of roses in full bloom and of as deep a red as that which had been given to Moira by Jenks the Pinks.
If Gomer had had a less sonorous approach to living he could have put his hand over the fence and helped himself to a handful.
Instead, he went up the garden path and knocked on the door. The woman appeared and peeped out. She looked as if Old Moore had been keeping her prepared for the coming of Gomer for years. Gomer held out to her the unpetalled stem of Moira’s first rose.
“Since the beauty has slipped from this,” he said and gave a light laugh which did not help, “could I prevail upon you to furnish the lips of Meadow Prospect’s Carmen, Moira Hallam, with a rose on a par with that grown by Naboth Jenks the Pinks?”
Every reservation she had ever felt about her days on this earth crowded on to the woman’s face.
> Gazooka by Gwyn Thomas is published by Parthian at £9. parthianbooks.com
CONTINUES TOMORROW