Counting Stars Read Online Free PDF

too.
    “Go on,” she said. “You need the nourishment. Get them down.”
    Colin looked at his watch and said it was all right. We’d be there on time. So we stood there and munched and drank and started to smile.
    “So lovely,” said Mrs. Minto. “So warm and bright. Jesus safe in Heaven. Mam tucked up in hospital, and here’s us all together on God’s good Earth.”
    Margaret inspected the angel in her hand. The surface was crumbly and one of the wings had snapped.
    “Don’t worry,” whispered Catherine. “She’ll love it just the same.”
    I lifted the lid of the tin and showed the others resting safe in there.
    The trumpet and bell sounded from a distant boundary.
    Mrs. Minto tilted her head.
    “Can you hear that?” she said. “It’s gone round and round in my head all day long.”

The Baby
    T HERE WAS A SEAMSTRESS, Miss Golightly, who lived in Kitchener Street behind Felling Square. We bought our gloves and balaclavas from her. She lengthened our hems and altered our hand-me-downs. She was no taller than I, she smelt of mints and liniment and cologne. She had a thin mustache and her earlobes were stretched by the silver earrings she wore. On cold days a tatty fur stole with animals’ heads hung over her cardigan and stared at you with stupid glassy eyes.
    There were kids who said she was a witch and who wouldn’t pass her door at night. They talked about spells and spirits. They said she’d stolen children and sold them to the devil. Her great-nephew, Kev, a red-haired boy of my own age, said the stories were true. He hated her. He said his family knew she’d done terrible things. She’d been a whore in her youth and after that nobody’d touch her with a barge pole and that was why she was alone.
    “Watch yourself,” he used to say. “She’s a filthy cow. She’ll start touching you up. Just you wait and see.”
    When I repeated some of this at home, Mam said there wasn’t a harmful bone in the woman’s body. She wanted no more than to have children to make and mend for, and she loved us all. This seemed true to me. I liked to be with her in her little front room, to stand on a chair before her while she held her pins between her teeth and tugged at hems and seams. She touched me so gently as she smoothed the clothes to fit the body. She stroked my hair and said how quickly I grew. Afterward there were jars of wrapped sweets on her sideboard, dozens of books on her shelves, framed faded photographs on her walls.
    The photographs seemed alien and ancient at first, but she guided me to see that the unknown existed within the familiar: that carnival with its brass band and tents and roundabouts took place on the fields at Felling Shore; those horses with the great leather halters around their necks drank from a trough at the center of Felling Square; that steep row of shops with the aproned proprietors outside was Felling High Street. Everywhere, there were glimpses of the world in which I’d grown: the broad river, the curve of the Heather Hills, St. Patrick’s steeple, the unmistakable gradients and intersections of our streets, the shapes of buildings beneath reconstructed facades, the names of public houses and businesses rewritten but unchanged. I sought familiarity in the people, too, looking for my ancestry in the faces of those who had held still while the film was exposed, and trying to decipher the shapes of those who had moved and left only translucent impressions like ghosts.
    As I leaned close, I kept whispering, “Yes. I see.” And she smiled and nodded and squeezed my arm in congratulation.
    There were many pictures of nurses. They posed in formation in hospital grounds, they were busy in field hospitals preparing for the first war. They cared for the casualties: young men on benches or slumped in wheelchairs, with their bandages, their stump limbs, their brave smiling, their deadened eyes. Once she brought a parcel from another room: her old uniform, folded and pressed,