Birmingham Friends Read Online Free PDF

swimming again. And the best thing of all was that we’d talked and laughed together all the morning, just her and me as close as close.
    Before lunch we walked up the steep path from the beach to the cliff top, our legs scratched by gorse as we climbed the path of compacted mud, small stones rattling away from our pumps. We found a place to sit on the wiry grass which topped the headland, and looked out over the hazy blue of the estuary, tiny white sails in the distance.
    Olivia sat leaning back on her hands, her legs stretched out in front, the warm wind blowing her hair back from her face.
    ‘I found a piano in that back sitting room in the hotel,’ she said. ‘So we shan’t have to do without playing after all.’
    ‘No music.’
    ‘But we’ll remember it, won’t we?’
    When she said we I knew she really just meant herself. She sat for hours at a time in front of the piano at home, whereas I was forever looking for excuses to get out of practising, and Mummy didn’t pay too much attention to whether I did or not.
    ‘It’ll be something to do after dinner,’ Olivia said. ‘If we’re not already done in from all this fresh air.’
    She leaned her head back and closed her eyes. I could see the shape of her eyes moving restlessly under the lids. I sat watching her. Both of us had changed in appearance since we first became friends, but we had spent so much of our time together that I barely noticed Olivia’s looks alter any more than I did my own. Since she had been away at school in Staffordshire and I didn’t see her for weeks on end, though, I’d begun to notice things. Livy’s voice, which was deep and strong, had become even more forthright with a confidence that the school had given her, its Birmingham intonation fading. Her hair was thicker and glossier. She was thinner, had a waist suddenly, and breasts. Curiously I looked down at my own body. I’d certainly not been short-changed on that front. Just like my Granny Munro. My legs looked much pinker and rounder than Olivia’s slim ones.
    ‘I wish they hadn’t sent you away to that school.’ It was far from the first time I’d made this complaint. ‘It’s not the same without you around.’
    I was waiting for Olivia to agree and say how much she missed me during the term time and how there was no one else at school who was half such a good friend. This familiar conversation was like a ritual seal on our friendship.
    But this time Olivia said, without even opening her eyes, ‘Well, it could be worse. Gets me away from them at least.’
    ‘Who?’
    ‘Mummy and Daddy, of course.’
    ‘But they’re marvellous, your parents!’
    Olivia started laughing, sitting up hugging her knees, her body shaking.
    ‘What? What did I say?’
    ‘Oh, Katie. You’re so innocent, aren’t you?’
    I felt cross suddenly. Olivia was putting on that superior tone she sometimes used, as if the fact that she was a mere six months older let her into all sorts of adult secrets.
    ‘I’m not,’ I said sulkily. ‘Granny Munro tells me all sorts of things.’
    Olivia laughed again. ‘How is your mad granny?’
    ‘She’s not mad,’ I protested, with a reluctant grin. ‘She does it all on purpose.’
    Granny Munro, Daddy’s mother, had come from Scotland to live with us only three months ago, after my grandfather died. She had made up a little bit for Livy not being around. Already she had appeared at the breakfast table with no clothes on, told the local grocer’s that she needed biscuits and cheese on tick because we wouldn’t give her any money and set up a trestle table at the front of the house in Chantry Road in order to hold her own jumble sale because she had brought too many possessions to Birmingham with her. She was driving Mummy nearly demented.
    ‘It’s been really fun having her living with us,’ I said. ‘She tells me all sorts of things Mummy would never dream of saying.’
    Olivia had lain back suddenly, head among the blades of grass,