Free A Fool's Alphabet by Sebastian Faulks

said Coleman, ‘but this is the one town in America you can’t, because there aren’t any. It’s the home of the Women’s Christian Temperance Union, founders of Prohibition. Right here in Evanston. But they let you drink in restaurants, so I suggest we have another bottle of wine.’
    By the time they left the restaurant Pietro felt that he had revealed more than he had at first intended, but it didn’t seem to matter. He walked the streets in a happy glow as he searched for the house he had been lent: along the lake front with its spacious mansions and their commanding views, then back into the ordered rows of houses beneath the soft glow of the street lamps, their big cars pulled up off the street, the tended lawns and the occasional smudge of curtained light. To the east was the pleasant oak-lined stretch of Lake Shore Drive, to the west the raised interchanges of the Kennedy Expressway. You could be happy here, he thought – big city, small town, whatever you wanted it to be.
    I am going to die, he thought. It seemed a shameful response to the news of impending parenthood. He lay flat on his back, with the sound of Hannah asleep beside him, staring into the darkness. He felt as though his body was shaking with the closeness of death. He heard the rattle in his lungs as he breathed, and regretted each cigarette that might have contributed. He felt the delicate tissue of hisflesh and imagined the blood vessels starting to swell and seize, their fantastic intricacy unregarded by him until it was too late. He pictured the big organs of his body, the liver, the kidney, things he had treated with disdain, beginning to buckle and rot. More than anything he felt the pressure of darkness, a fear of being turned off like a light.
    This was not what he had expected to feel when Hannah had emerged from the bathroom that morning bearing a flat plastic tube about the length of a thermometer, in which were cut two small windows. Across the dead centre of each one were two firm blue lines.
    She passed the tube to him without comment.
    â€˜What does this mean?’ he said.
    â€˜It’s positive. I’m definitely pregnant.’
    â€˜Shouldn’t you have it confirmed by a doctor?’
    â€˜I could, but the doctors can’t tell any more accurately than these tests.’
    After the celebrations and the hasty planning about who should be told and where they should live, he felt only like death. It was as if he had never previously thought himself subject to termination; as though he believed that when death came he would be unavailable, too young, or somewhere else at the time.
    He looked down at Hannah’s brown hair against the blue cotton pillowcase. She seemed by contrast invigorated; not dying but reanimated.
    He got out of bed and walked into the sitting room of their London flat. He lit a cigarette – a suicidal gesture – and pulled back the curtain. There was a drone of traffic from the arterial road going north, then a car starting and revving angrily a few streets away. The driver kept his foot down on the accelerator, pumping and pumping the stationary car for three or four minutes before he clutchlessly engaged first gear and moved off. There was a whistle of Victorian plumbing behind the plastered walls and then the half-silence of the city night again.
    Lately involved either in dealing with cash flow and shareownership or with the equally abstract and delicate negotiation of his marriage, he was surprised by the primitive fear that held him. This was the same puzzled terror with which savages had looked down at the corpses of their friends or mates. Now here was he, a sentient man in a European world of complex futures and medical research, and he had never even contemplated death.
    He turned his mind to Hannah and the invisible embryo inside her that represented some fatal intertwining of genetic codes, even now locked into a determined course.
    Then he felt an