Being Small by Chaz Brenchley

Author:Chaz Brenchley [Brenchley, Chaz]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Per Aspera Press
Published: 2014-08-28T04:00:00+00:00

How long’s a piece of string, Michael?

As long as you let it be. How long can I have?

As long as Small allows it.

That really was the way it worked, the way we worked it out between the three of us. If I’d been a thief, she’d have given us just enough rope for Small to hang me. She felt safe to let me run, because she knew she could rely on Small to rein me in again, because he always did. Twins watch out for each other, she used to say that often, until neither one of us needed to hear it anymore.

Which was maybe why I didn’t want to tell her about my ongoing adventures at number thirty-nine. Her interest would pique Small’s jealousy, which would bring not an end but an immediate limit to those adventures, thus far and no further: she lets you out and I pull you back, you know you can’t be trusted by yourself.

I knew he didn’t trust me out alone, which might or might not be the same thing. But as long as our mother didn’t know, then we were in collusion, Small and I, and that was a different thing entirely. Twins need to share their secrets, or what was ever the point of being twinned?

I found a bakery and bought a couple of cheese pasties, munching as I walked back to the house. It was another sunny day, we were having a run of them, it almost amounted to a summer; maybe I’d take a book to the park. Maybe I’d take a book and a dog.

Kit’s silver Mini was parked in the lane, because their drive was full of cars. I went home, washed crumbs and grease off my face and fingers, did the best I could with my hair, collected my book and the bag of Kit’s clothes and headed straight out again.

Confidently up the drive and round to the back of the house, squeezing by all the cars; a confident ring on the offshoot doorbell, the usual blizzard of barking and Nigel’s happy feet against the woodwork; a long wait, longer than usual, longer far than you’d expect. Long enough, eventually, to have me ringing again. And then cautiously opening the door, knowing that it was never locked; sticking my head inside the offshoot and calling out, “Hullo?”

No answer, but I could hear voices dimly, thickly, faded by distance and roughened by the walls and doors between us, all but drowned altogether by Nigel’s noise. I quieted him as best I could and went up to the door into the house proper. And knocked there, much less confident now; and was just on the turn, just wanting not to be heard after all so that I could slip away and be gone and pretend I never came, when I saw a figure through the dimpled glass.

The door opened, and it was Gerard. The big man, all in his shirtsleeves, no tie but his good suit trousers that he

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