Walsh Family 2 - Rachel's Holiday by Marian Keyes

Author:Marian Keyes
Language: eng
Format: mobi, azw3
Tags: Romance
ISBN: 9780141909813
Publisher: Penguin Adult
Published: 0101-01-01T00:00:00+00:00

I prayed – although not with any great faith – that when we got to the school, Margaret might have broken her leg or died or something handy like that.

No chance.

So on the way back I prayed that I might break my leg or die. I often prayed to break my leg, actually. You got loads of sweets and everyone had to be nice to you.

But I reached home, alive, with full bodily integrity, and almost gibbering with terror.

There was a brief moment when I thought I was saved – my mother couldn’t open the back door. She jiggled and fiddled the key and still nothing happened. She pulled the handle towards her and tried again, but the door remained closed.

And a trickle of ominous fear began in me.

The grim muttering that Mum had been doing under her breath grew louder and less muttery and more shouty.

‘What’s wrong, Mummy?’ I asked, anxiously.

‘The lock seems to be fecking well broken,’ she said.

Then I was really afraid! My mother never said ‘fecking’. She gave out to Daddy when he did and told him to say ‘flipping’ instead. Things must be bad.

With a deep, abiding certainty, I knew that this was all my fault. It had something to do with me eating Margaret’s Easter egg. I’d done a bad sin, it might even be a mortal one, although I wasn’t really sure what that was, and now I was being punished. Me and my family.

I waited for the sky to darken the way it did in the pictures of Good Friday I’d seen, after Baby Jesus died.

‘Isn’t this desperate, Rachel?’ Claire asked slyly. ‘We’ll never see the inside of our lovely house again.’

At that I burst into noisy, terrified, guilty tears.

‘Stop it,’ Mum hissed at Claire. ‘She’s bad enough as it is.’

‘We’ll get a man to fix the lock,’ Mum told me impatiently. ‘Stay here, mind Anna, while I run over to Mrs Evans to ring someone.’

As soon as she was gone, Margaret and Claire regaled me with horror stories of girls in their class in school who’d had the lock on their house broken and never got back into their homes.

‘She had to go and live in the dump,’ Claire said. ‘And wear torn clothes.’

‘And she had a cornflakes box for her pillow,’ Margaret added.

‘And her only toy was a piece of paper that she had to make into shapes, even though she’d had piles of dolls and fuzzy felt in her house.’

I wept terrified tears, appalled at what I’d destroyed. I was single-handedly responsible for depriving my family of a home. All for being a little pig.

‘Can’t we get another house?’ I begged.

‘Oh no.’ They both shook their heads.’ Houses cost a lot of money.’

‘But I’ve got money in my tin,’ I offered. I would have given my life, let alone the fifty new pence I had in the red post-box tin that Auntie Julia had given me.

‘But the tin is locked in the house,’ Claire pointed out and the pair of them collapsed with malicious laughter.

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