Black Sheep Read Online Free PDF Page A

turning over and back in the bed to try and ease herself. Ted knelt on the floor in front of the window and looked out over Mount of Zeal, seeing the smoke rise from the chimneys on Lower to mingle with those above, but all going straight up cleanly into the stillness. There were few clouds.
    For once, Reuben was not downstairs thundering out the lines from Job, which he was reading through aloud for the hundredth time. He had gone out, to walk heavily along the terraces to the end and the old metal bench which someone had placed there in memory of a relative, years ago. It needed painting and the metal slats were broken in a couple of places but the family had died out and no one else saw fit to mend it. Reuben sat there on Sundays while those who went to church went to church, for if he knew his scriptures inside out and by heart, he did not care to hear them read in a voice other than his own, nor be preached at by any man.
    Ted could not see him from the window but he could see the thin file of dark clothed figures leaving chapel and boys he knew playing marbles in the dust bowls. When the nurse in blue arrived now she ignored him, knowing he would not come closer to the bed and stare. He sensed that his grandmother liked him to be there, though no word was ever said about it between them, he simply arrived the minute he had eaten his tea, and left when it was dark. Evie had mentioned it only once and then left him to do as he pleased. Once, his father had come up with him, huge and awkward in the room, reaching to touch his mother then drawing his hand back in case it was the wrong thing.
    â€˜I can send the others, if you’d like it.’
    But Alice moved her head restlessly on the pillows. ‘Ted’s my company. I’m beyond the rest.’
    John stayed another couple of minutes. He had no words but a murmur flowed deep beneath his silence. He bent over to kiss her and left, glancing at Ted, hesitating, but in the end saying nothing to the boy.
    Evie came every day and the nurse in blue. Alice cried with pain, slept, lay without moving or turned about, hot and restless. The boy stayed with her all day that last weekend, and would not leave at night, so that it was he who went to her when she called once, and touched her when she let out a rasping few breaths, shuddered and went still.
    Something seemed to happen in the room. The air lightened. He had been holding his breath tightly as if to keep it in his chest and now he let it go and it floated away from him like a feather. He had never known such silence.

5
    REUBEN CAME DOWN to live with them less than a month later. There was no room for him, and Evie had been happy to continue taking his washing up and down the slopes, and hot food under a cloth. But he had wept, for the first and only time in his life, when she had said he would be perfectly well off staying in the Paradise house on his own, and so she had had little choice. She was aware that his tears were false and selfish, and that his repeated reading aloud that a ‘precious woman was worth more than rubies’ was moral blackmail. But she gave in to the blackmail, Clive and Jimmy fetched down his things, the old furniture was sold for next to nothing, and Reuben moved to Lower Terrace. He came with just his clothes, his own armchair and the black Bible, but his arrival still made the walls of the already crowded house bulge outwards.
    For Evie, the worst was his constant presence looming in the room. She was used to having men about, but they were men with a purpose, men who got up, went to the pit, came back, ate, drank, went to bed, slept, got up again, and at other times made themselves scarce. She felt spied upon. If she took ten minutes out to stand at the door or talk to a neighbour, Reuben saw her and she felt judged. He said nothing, but he looked on. The other men barely noticed him. They simply shifted a bit to make room and carried on as before.
    For Ted, the arrival of his