PROFESSIONAL READER
said the title.
I will come and read for you. I will read anything. Books, magazines, newspapers, poetry. You name it. I will read for as long as you like, at home or maybe at the park, if it's a nice day. Can do a range of voices. Perfect for children, those with poor eyesight or simply those who miss being read to. Payment per hour or by the page, if you prefer.
I wondered what kind of people would really respond. I was soon to find out.
The first was an elderly man named Ernest. His daughter had seen my announcement and told him about me. He was once a librarian, but he had since lost his eyesight and would never read again. I would go and read to him on Tuesday and Thursday mornings, for an hour at a time. The first thing he wanted me to read was On The Road. He wanted the escapism, I imagine. I looked forward to it.
A mother messaged me, too. A mother of three who worked night shifts, whose husband worked long hours during the day. He put the children to bed, but he was too tired to give them a bed time story. She was never there. I could tell that hurt her. She asked me if I could come a few nights a week and read to them. I asked her what she'd like me to read. Danny the Champion of the World, she said. Charlie and the Chocolate Factory. Matilda, The BFG. Charlotte's Web. The Faraway Tree. The Railway Children. I could tell she had loved to read as a child. I could see how it pained her that she couldn't read to her children. I would be more than happy to, I told her.
I received another message from a Geography student. He had really bad dyslexia, so acute that reading anything took him hours. He wanted me to read him his textbooks and journals so he could take better notes for essays. Three hours on a Monday, Wednesday and Thursday. I told him I'd give him a student discount; he said it was okay, his mother was rich and didn't want him so she smothered him with money instead of love. I told him she sounded like she needed to be read a mothering manual.
The requests flooded in. Soon I could barely fit people in. I would read until my throat was raw. At children's parties and old age homes, to businessmen on their lunch break, to night watchmen in their little cabins, to middle aged women in their city gardens, to the blind, on park benches, whilst I caressed their dog's golden head. Zadie Smith and Salman Rushdie, Rudyard Kipling and Richard Dawkins, Plath and Hughes, Eliot and Pound, biographies, autobiographies, self-help manuals, The Times, The Economist, New Scientist. I read Lady Chatterly's Lover to a frail 90 year old. I blushed; she loved it.
My favourite client was an old Chinese lady who lived in a beautiful apartment near Richmond Park. I read to her once a week. She would ask me to read her poetry until she fell asleep. Wordsworth, mostly, and some Keats. She said her mother used to read it to her, as a child, long before she could understand English. She said she loved the way the words sounded, and she would make up her own stories about what they meant. Now that she understood, the images mixed in her mind. Young Wordsworth ran around the Sichuan countryside as she had as a child. As I read, she closed her eyes and smiled. I would read until she was fast asleep, then let myself out, leaving her to dream of daffodils pushing up through drenched paddy fields.
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