Counting Stars Read Online Free PDF Page B

wrapped in tissue and brown paper; the dark blue skirts and the brilliant white pinafore, the cross on the bib darkened to the color of blood. She held it before her body and posed for me. She directed me to the photographs. “Where am I?” she asked, and time after time I scanned the faces until I learned to see her quick and true: the little bright and beaming one, who still survived in the gentle seamstress at my side.
    It was inevitable that as I grew older her seams should begin to pucker and twist. We noticed it first when she was making me trousers from a length of blackout cloth we’d found in the back of a drawer. She was distracted that day, she found it difficult to focus on her task.
    “How old are you?” she asked.
    “Ten,” I answered.
    She counted on her fingers, whispered numbers, decades.
    “Ten?”
    “Yes. Ten.”
    “Ten.”
    She meditated, or dreamt, with her needle poised in midair. It was November, near to Remembrance Day. I remember the red poppies we were wearing at our breasts. Frost was resting in the joints of the cobbles outside. A family hurried by, parents and small children in a close group with their breath in clouds around them. When she came out of it and stitched again, her fingers slipped and she drew a little bulb of blood from my leg.
    “Poor soul,” she whispered as she dabbed my skin with cotton wool. “Such tender things.”
    She stitched again, half dreaming.
    “How old are you?” she asked. “How old?”
    Afterward we stood before the photographs again.
    “There you are,” I told her.
    “And here’s this one,” she said.
    Beneath her finger was a grinning black-haired soldier, helmet in his hand, thick uniform buttoned to his throat. He stood by a front door like hers, which opened directly to the pavement. Even in this darkened print you saw how the sun had beaten down that day, glared upon the brick walls and the threshold, how the soldier narrowed his dark eyes against the relentless light and grinned and grinned.
    “See?” she said.
    “Yes.”
    She turned me to another photograph, a crowd of soldiers in loose formation on a railway platform on a duller day.
    “Where is he?” she said.
    I played the game, scanned the faces.
    “That one.”
    “No. This one,” she said. “This bonny one.”
    We went to other photographs.
    “Where is he?”
    “This one.”
    “No, this one. See?”
    “I see.”
    She cupped my chin in her palm. She pressed my cheek with the tips of her cold fingers, pressed harder upon my cheekbone, traced the delicate curve of my temple.
    “Silly bonny boy,” she said. “And where is he now?”
    She dreamt again, then left me and went to somewhere else in the house and came back with another photograph. It was the head of the soldier, in shirt and tie, relaxed, hardly faded at all, smiling through the even light at us. The name of a Felling photographer was embossed in the corner of the print.
    “Here he is,” she said.
    She touched the flesh of my cheek again.
    She wrapped up the trousers in brown paper.
    “I told him, you know. Don’t go. Nurses know the body’s such a soft and fragile thing.”
    At home, Mam fingered the crooked stitching at my waist. She tugged the material and tried to make it fall evenly to my ankles. She knelt at my side with scissors and needle and thread, opened the stitches, tried to close them again more evenly. She sighed and shook her head and said they’d just have to do, I could use them for playing in.
    I told her about the soldier.
    “Poor body,” she whispered. “Poor soul.”
    We didn’t use Miss Golightly for some time afterward.
    Mam still called on her, and came back with stories of how she was failing.
    It was my eleven-plus year. Dad said that I was carrying the dreams of the past, that I was a pioneer. Preparation at school was relentless: day after day of Maths Progress Tests and English Progress Tests and prayers that the hardworking would be rewarded. I took the examination at