Clever Girl Read Online Free PDF

I’d ever seen him beyond the end of our street. He lifted his head and peered over his shoulder at me: doleful long face, unshaven cheeks and chin, the beard-growth specked with silver. The inner rim of his lower eyelids was lined in sore, wet red.
    — Come and look at this, he said.
    Clive was strange. One of his boots was made up with a special thick sole because of his sloping, dragging walk; he had had meningitis when he was three and his twin sister had died of it. We had lived in the same house since I could remember, but he and I had an unspoken agreement not to acknowledge each other, except when our connection was mediated by our mothers. — Can you believe he had yellow curls once? Mrs Walsh would sigh. — Say hello to Stella, Clive.
    — Say hello to Clive, my mother would order, shoving me sharply in the small of the back. She was full of ostentatious pity for the ‘poor thing’, but also thought it might be better for everyone if he was ‘put away’, whatever that meant. — It’s not much of a life, she said.
    I’m not sure whether Clive really recognised me that morning; we never spoke about it afterwards. I might just have been any passing little girl.
    — Look what I’ve found, he said.
    Warily I stepped over the wall into the interior of the vanished house. Swallows were flitting and shrieking inside the space, they nested there. Against the wall where Clive was sitting, fallen into the cracks in the stones and rolled into the grass, was an improbable slew of buttons of all sorts – thousands of buttons, much more than a handful or even a tinful. I crouched down to them, wondering, not touching yet.
    — Who do they belong to? How did they get here?
    Clive said he had known the woman who once lived here and they must be hers. I’d played here often and I’d never seen the buttons before, but I began to believe him because he was so certain. Did he mean a woman who’d lived in this house before it was bombed? Some of these buttons were old: carved jet ones, brass ones with military insignia, cream cloth-covered ones for shirts. Others looked modern: coloured plastic ones, like the ones my Nana put on my cardigans, were still sewn on to the cards they’d been bought on. Some were fastened into sets – miniature mother-of-pearl buttons for baby clothes, pink glass drops – but most of them were loose, jumbled chaotically together: ordinary black and brown and white ones, a coral rose, wooden toggles, a diamanté buckle, big yellow bone squares, toggles made of bamboo.
    Something about the sheer multiplicity of the buttons – the fact that you couldn’t get to the bottom of them – started an ache of desire in my chest. I thought that Clive was feeling the same thing. He breathed through his mouth noisily. His cheeks under their strong beard-growth were dramatic, hollow as if they’d been carved out with something clumsy like an axe; the raw mask of a man’s face was overlaid on his life which was more like the life of a child. Every afternoon Clive was allowed to wander out along our road. He always stopped at one particular lamp post, as if it was a limit his mother had set him; he would be standing there when the children came home from school, hunched over, smoking and watching us, wearing his overcoat in winter, a short grey mac in summer. We squealed and ran past him – even I did, pretending I didn’t know him. Every teatime Mrs Walsh came out to bring him back, pulling him coaxingly by the hand; a small, bent, fat old woman tugging at a tall, scowling, resisting man, showing her patient smile around to anyone who might see them.
    — We could take them home for your mother, I suggested.
    But I wanted the coral rose for myself, or the buckle. I put my hand out to pick them up; angrily Clive pushed it away, scuffing some of the buttons into the dirt with his normal boot.
    — Don’t touch them. Leave them, he scolded.
    Close up, I could smell his familiar smell, the same as in