The Girl Who Thought Her Mother Was a Mermaid by Tania Unsworth & Helen Crawford-White

Author:Tania Unsworth & Helen Crawford-White [Unsworth, Tania & Crawford-White, Helen]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781788541664
Amazon: B07659LPK6
Publisher: Zephyr
Published: 2018-07-12T00:00:00+00:00

Twenty-three

Stella woke early to the sound of the door opening. She leaped to her feet, instantly awake. Pearl wheeled through the door, closing it behind her with a quick flip of her makeshift hook. She was wearing a slightly less dingy dress, and her hair was scraped into a bun, although her efforts only made her seem more pitiful. As she crossed the room, she looked as insubstantial as her own cloudy reflection, flickering in the wardrobe mirror.

‘I brought you breakfast,’ she said. A cup of tea and a piece of toast – the butter spread extremely thin – lay on a tray on her lap. She placed the tray on the bed next to Stella.

‘I don’t want it,’ Stella said. ‘I want to go home.’

‘I’m sorry,’ Pearl said, her eyes downcast.

Stella had the feeling that Pearl didn’t like what Marcie was doing any more than Stella did.

‘If you’re sorry, why don’t you let me out?’

‘Even if I let you through the door, it wouldn’t be any good,’ Pearl said. ‘You have to go through the kitchen to get to the front, and Marcie’s there, like, always. She sleeps next to the desk, on a pull-out cot.’

‘You could call someone.’

‘She’s got the only phone.’

‘You could go out yourself, then!’ Stella cried. ‘You could get help, tell the police…’

Pearl twisted her pale hands together. ‘I can’t,’ she said, her voice anguished. ‘I daren’t, you don’t understand.’

‘You’re frightened of her,’ Stella said.

Pearl’s lips tightened until her mouth almost vanished. ‘She’s a terrible person,’ she said with sudden feeling. ‘Cruel and stupid and reckless.’

‘She’s mad,’ Stella said.

‘Yes. But not in the way you think.’

‘Why do you stay here if you hate her so much?’

‘I more than hate her,’ Pearl said. ‘There isn’t a word for how I feel.’ She broke off, shaking her head. ‘I’m sorry about your mother. More sorry than you can know.’

She looked up, and Stella saw that her eyes were red-rimmed, and her face had a raw, rubbed look, as if she had been crying for a long time, through the night.

‘Not an hour has gone by in all these years that I haven’t thought about her,’ Pearl said. ‘I wonder, did she ever… say anything about me?’

Stella shook her head.

‘No,’ Pearl said in a low voice. ‘Of course not, how could she?’

Again she paused. ‘Tell me,’ she said at last. ‘Was she happy?’

It was a strange question. Stella had never thought of it quite like that before. The memory of a long-ago summer night came back to her. She had been in bed, and had come downstairs, although she didn’t know why. She remembered stopping at the foot of the stairs. The windows were open, letting in the night air, and she could hear music playing. Her parents were dancing together in the living room, under a circle of light. It was old-fashioned dancing, the kind with proper steps. But Stella could tell her mum wasn’t quite sure of them, because she kept glancing at her feet, and trying not to laugh.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.