The Voice in My Ear by Frances Leviston

Author:Frances Leviston [Leviston, Frances]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781473572409
Publisher: Random House

Claire’s old room was Tessa’s room now. They had shared when they were little, then Tessa had moved down to Neal’s room when Neal left. When Claire left too, Tessa had wanted to move back, so they’d put all Claire’s stuff into the cupboard: the room had a deep cupboard that went right back into the eaves. Claire had made a den of this for her and Tess when they were younger. She’d run fairy lights into it and put blankets on the floor. It was an eighth room, really, if you didn’t mind crouching all the time. She’d even put a sign on the door, Room Eight, in wobbly script. Occasionally, she’d slept in there all night, careless of the silverfish, the cold.

Claire and Mark spent hours going through the cupboard. Claire stayed upstairs the whole time, sorting through her stuff, while Mark carried the bin bags down and loaded them into his car.

‘We can take those,’ Joan said, and Henry agreed: he said, ‘You can leave the rubbish,’ but Mark politely insisted that they would be driving past the tip either way. He had already carried a couple of transparent crates upstairs, which Claire would presumably fill with things she wanted to keep, if she wanted to keep anything at all. Joan watched the procession of black bin bags, the rising pile in the car’s dropped backseat, and despaired. How could she want so little? Disposing of the Barbies and the ancient birthday cards was one thing, but what about her notes from university, her artwork from GCSE?

Joan remembered the struggle to decide what to keep from her own mother’s house. The glass bead necklaces, heavy, like strings of marbles. The ugly squadron of Toby jugs. But that had been unavoidable. Her mother had been dead, a stroke at seventy-six – would Claire even remember? – and Joan’s brothers were worse than useless at practical things, so she’d left Henry with the kids and done it herself in one weekend. And those had been her mother’s things, not Joan’s. She wondered for a moment where her own schoolbooks were, and found that she didn’t know. She and Henry had a deep cupboard in their room, too, full of old suitcases, and curtains too short for this house’s windows, and the boxed-up Toby jugs. Perhaps she would look for them later.

Mark dumped another bag in the car. When he’d powered back upstairs, Joan ventured out across the gravel and looked into the open boot. The bags lay slumped heavily across one another. Their twisted ends wrinkled and breathed. One was untied: she plunged her hand in, a lucky dip, grabbed the spine of something, and pulled it out. She’d been hoping for a schoolbook – something full of Claire’s sweet round handwriting from before she forcibly changed it, age fourteen, to a spiky mess – but it was a programme: Muster’s Puppets presents … A Journey Round the Moon.

She was amazed. Claire had always maintained that she could not

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