Always You Read Online Free PDF

the fragrant sweetpeas that Dad had picked from the garden two days ago and which now sat, wilting, on the bedside table. Fear, terrible fear, ballooned in her chest.
    ‘Sarah.’
    She leaned over her mother’s body, already still, like a corpse. She held her ear close to her mother’s lips, her heart tight and cold in her breast, and waited.
    ‘Take care of Becky.’ Her mother’s breath was a caress, like a summer’s breeze. ‘You’re sister and mother to her now.’
    The last words her mother had said to her.
    Becky’s quiet voice cracked through the memories. ‘It wasn’t right of Mum to ask you to take care of me,’ she said, harbinger of a message that Sarah stubbornly refused to own. ‘You were little more than a child yourself.’ Becky paused. ‘You must know that.’
    Sarah looked away, her heart heavy with old, well-worn guilt. There was logic and truth in what Becky said. But her mother had asked. And she had promised. She’d spent the rest of her life trying to fulfil that promise. Such a contract, so solemnly made, could not be broken, despite Becky’s plausible arguments to the contrary. She blinked to clear her vision. ‘But if I don’t look out for you, who will?’
    ‘I’m thirty years old, Sarah,’ smiled Becky, ‘I think I can look after myself.’
    Sarah returned the smile but knew in her heart that this wasn’t true. Becky was always borrowing money off her, though to be fair she did pay it back – eventually. She’d been thrown out of accommodation twice in her early twenties for not paying her rent and she was still living in a rented flat with no prospect of buying somewhere of her own.
    Becky bent down, picked up a couple of glassy, grey, sharp-edged stones and stood up again, holding them in her mittened palm for Sarah to see. ‘Do you know they found evidence of Neolithic people living in this bay? They made tools from this flint. It’s over two hundred million years old.’ She turned the stone in her hand and gazed dreamily along the beach. ‘It’s amazing to think that we’re walking in the footsteps of Stone Age humans who lived over six thousand years ago. They reckon they lived in caves up there on the hill.’ She pointed at the green plateau that rose high above sea level. ‘And came down to the seashore to forage for shellfish.’
    ‘How do you know that?’
    Becky slipped the flintstones into her pocket. ‘I quite often go to the library at lunchtime. I like the idea of learning about our ancestors by the evidence they left behind.’
    ‘Well,’ said Sarah, pulling the collar of her coat tighter. ‘I wouldn’t have fancied running about in nothing but animal furs, trying to kill your dinner with a bit of stone tied to the end of a stick. It must’ve been a bleak existence.’
    Becky laughed. ‘A short one too, by all accounts. They rarely made it past forty.’
    The age at which their mother had died. And their father, whom Sarah had believed invincible, had fallen apart.
    It was shortly after the funeral. She was filling a glass with water at the kitchen sink, her swollen eyes gritty and sore from crying. Dad was in the back garden bringing in the washing, an expression of grim determination on his face. When he came to Mum’s favourite pink nightdress, he unpegged it tenderly and stood for some moments with it clutched against his breast.
    Suddenly, he dropped to his knees on the damp grass, wooden pegs spilling out from the bag in his hand like kindling. Sarah rushed to the door but stalled at the sound of his sobbing, coming through the opened window. A kind of mewling, like a cat caught in a trap. It was unbearable, a private moment of grief never meant for sharing. Quickly, she turned and walked away.
    Sarah’s heart pounded in her chest. It astounded her how, all these years later, she could still be so unexpectedly ambushed by moments of grief. She pushed the image resolutely out of her mind and focused on the present.
    The children were