Divided Kingdom Read Online Free PDF

refer, half in jest, to the fact that Marie had abandoned him in his hour of need – and what’s more, as a result of her leaving the house like that and staying out for half the night, poor Thomas had been forced to wait until the next day before he even so much as
set eyes
on his new sister, whereupon Marie and I would exchange a look of barely suppressed amusement. We knew better. It was our secret, though. I loved Marie from the beginning – but not as a sister exactly, and not as a mother either.
    I quickly realised how lucky I was to have been placed with the Parrys. Marie led her own life, the exuberant, dishevelled life of a seventeen year old, but she never made me feel excluded or unwanted. As for my father, Victor, it simply wasn’t in him to treat me badly, though he did tend to veer between mild hysteria and complete absent-mindedness, a pattern of behaviour which, like so much else, I would only fully understand in years to come. This much I knew: his wife, Jean Parry, had been taken on the same night as I had, another victim of the Rearrangement, and he was still mourning the loss of her, still adjusting to her absence. Marie seemed to care less – on the surface, at least. Maybe, like me, she kept all those feelings hidden. I sometimes wonder if there wasn’t a sense in which they looked on me as some sort of substitute for Jean, a kind of reimbursement. But perhaps that’s overstating it. Distraction might be a better word. I was something that would take theirminds off the violence that had been done to them, something that would alter the shape of their sorrow. Marie took it upon herself to try and occupy the maternal role, just as my travelling companion had implied she might, while Victor assumed responsibility for the running of the household. Seen from the outside, then, my arrival had a beneficial effect, since it forced them to pull together and begin to function as a unit again.
    As for my other parents, my real parents, I never heard what became of them, and I could never quite bring myself to ask. There was the loss itself, of course, which was hard enough, but I was also battling a sense of shame. I had turned my back on them, you might even say that I’d betrayed them, and I didn’t know how to come to terms with that. It was easier to pretend they didn’t exist. What’s more, in the circumstances, asking such a question would have seemed ungrateful, if not callous – and besides, I doubt whether Victor or Marie would have been able to tell me anything. The rift between past and present was absolute, for all of us. The image I was left with, of two people standing on a road in the middle of the night, people who hadn’t even had the time to dress properly, was one that I consigned to the very darkest corner of my memory, and there it remained, like a discarded childhood toy – the ukulele with its broken strings, the moulting, one-eyed teddy bear.
    We were living in momentous times, historic times – the country had been dismembered, families had been torn apart, whole sections of the population were suffering from what became known as ‘border sickness’ – and yet I seemed to take it all in my stride. I remember Victor sitting at the kitchen table with a newspaper on one of my first mornings in the house.
    â€˜That Song fellow’s going to be Prime Minister,’ he said.
    I remembered Miss Groves mentioning the name. To her, Michael Song had been something of a hero. He had attended the underground meetings that altered the nation’s destiny for ever, and later, when he had been classified as sanguine, he had founded a new political party, installing himself as leader.
    â€˜I saw a poster yesterday,’ Victor said. ‘Michael Song. Voice of the People.’ He snorted. ‘Talk about putting the cart before the horse.’
    He picked up his newspaper, but put it down again almost