A Dark Dividing Read Online Free PDF Page A

floors and grim-faced people, and clanging iron doors that were locked at precisely the same time each night. In some complicated way the little girl seemed to have lived in the black cold place for practically her whole life. Simone did not really understand this, because she did not think people lived in houses like that these days.
    To begin with she had thought the black stone house might be a prison, but then she thought that children did not get put in prisons. It might be a hospital, except that hospitals were clean sharp places, full of light and busy brisk people; Simone knew that on account of once having to go to hospital when she fell off her bike. She had had to have her leg stitched up and they had given her an anti-tetanus shot, and the nurse who had done it had said, in a bright voice, Dear goodness, what were those marks on her left side, they were surely not scars, were they?—and in an offhand voice that Simone thought she was not meant to hear, Mother had said something about a difficult birth. But she had thought later on that the nurse was a bit dim not to know about birthmarks, which Mother said lots of people had; it was not a particularly big deal although it was probably better to be a bit discreet about when Simone went swimming or changed for games at school.
    The black stone house where the little girl seemed to live was not bright or brisk, and the people who lived there did not talk in that over-bright, slightly false kind of way. But wherever it was it was becoming gradually clearer to Simone, just as the little girl was becoming gradually clearer.
    It was quite difficult to imagine what it must be like to live in one place all your entire life. Simone and Mother had moved around and lived in quite a lot of different places, and each time they went to a new house Mother said, ‘There, now we’re nicely settled,’ but they never were, and after a time—it might be quite a long time but sometimes it was only a few months—the frightened look came back into Mother’s eyes and they were off again, looking for somewhere else and packing things up, and choosing another town.
    The little girl knew about the moving around, because she knew about most things Simone did. She did not wholly understand this part of Simone’s life, but she said that if Simone moved so often one day she should come to live near her. Simone could fix that, couldn’t she? It was usually pretty easy to fix things with grown-ups. There was an impression of some strong dislike about this—Simone thought the word was contempt, as if the little girl did not much like grown-ups. As if she liked getting the better of them.
    â€˜Yes, I do like getting the better of them,’ she said. ‘If you come to live here, I can tell you properly about that. We can be really together then. That would be extra specially good, wouldn’t it?’
    The little girl lived in a place called the Welsh Marches, she said—it was the part where England began to be Wales. Simone had never heard of it, and she was not sure if she wanted to live as near as all that to the little girl; she thought she might be a bit frightened of her.
    But she looked up the Welsh Marches in her school atlas and asked a question about it in geography one day. It sounded pretty good. There had been a lot of battles between people who wanted to protect Wales and people who wanted to take it over, which was interesting. And the Welsh people had written a great many ballads and poems and beautiful music about their history, said the teacher, pleased with Simone’s interest. They might have a lesson specially about it next week, and they might make it their term-project as well if everyone agreed. Simone had done very well to raise such an interesting topic.
    Simone told Mother about the project, and about thinking it might be a good place to live one day, and Mother said, vaguely, ‘Oh, I don’t think we’re