Drowned Sprat and Other Stories Read Online Free PDF

yellow hair and rosebud mouth, staring him full in the face as he stood in the threshold. He turned away, leaving the door open.
    ‘There’s a carton lying out on the drive,’ he told the Help. ‘Pack up those dolls, and the little men made of shells, would you?’
    ‘Dolls?’ She looked puzzled. She took off her coat.
    ‘In the other bedroom. There are a whole lot of dolls. Give them to the City Mission, or whoever.’
    In the garden Donald waited on the bench under the willow so that he wouldn’t be able to hear the clunk of china heads going into the box, the rustle of their dresses. When Daphne had left, run away with her young man, it was to lead a proper woman’s life. In her life with Donald, her battles with him, the dolls had been her foot soldiers, proof of her girlhood, her virginity. It was, he supposed, a kind of deprivation she’d practised on him: where his war wounds would have allowed him some kind of adult affection, the dolls prevented it. Could he have told Nikki all this? If he’d done so, kept her talking in the room with him, then he never would have lost Kieran. Perhaps Nikki, from her youthful, idealistic standpoint, would have shed some light on Daphne, helped him to understand … but that was a fantasy, and Donald had never been one for that.
    At five o’clock the Help called from the front steps, ‘Goodbye, Mr Outhwaite! Dinner’s in the oven — see you tomorrow!’ Donald made his weary way inside. In Daphne’s room she had done exactly as she was asked. The dolls weregone, and the little men made of shells. Only the stones remained, ranged along the windowsill, their painted features fading. Like him they were returning, slowly, quietly, to their lost, ambiguous selves.

The Night I Got My Tuckie
    Whenever Dad wants a drink, which is most nights, we have to drive across the town line — just him and me in the pickup like we hardly never used to when Mom was alive. Sometimes he tells me to change my sweater or wipe my face, but most nights he hardly even looks at me before we climb on up and drive on out of Zion. Some nights it’s south we go, to Al’s Bar, which has its northern wall along the boundary. One time I worked that out for myself, following along directly from the sign on the road — ZION TOWN LINE — the heel of one pink Barbie shoe hard against the toe of the other in a dead-straight line from the sign on the sidewalk until I come up against the Al’s brown concrete corner. That was years ago I did that. Don’t even fit those Barbie shoes no more.
    Other nights we go north, which is further to drive, across the Illinois-Wisconsin border. There’s a place there by the harbor Dad’s partial to, and I don’t mind it either. I mind it better thanAl’s, which is low-slung in its ceiling and thick with nasty air, a stink of smoke and spilled beer. Shame, but we go to Al’s more often, it being easier on Dad’s wallet and less miles to cover home.
    The bar in Wisconsin’s called Harbor Lights, which is funny, because there’s no lights you can see from there — you wouldn’t even know how close the harbor is ’less you took a big lungful in the carpark, and then you might get a whiff of lake weed. In the summer you can see boats towed by on the road and that’d tell you, but only if you were watching through the window.
    Harbor Lights is white and made of wood on the outside like a nice house. It’s got shutters that don’t shut and a pot of plastic flowers on a hook by the main door. Dad allus parks his pickup by the hook, so’s if I gets tired, I can curl up on the seat and look at the flowers. Once or twice I’ve seen night-bugs snooping in the petals, like they were being tricked by them and thought they were real. First time I saw them I showed Candy who works in the bar — I got right out of the truck and went right back in and asked her to come and look and Candy said a funny thing. She said, ‘Ruthie, those bugs are as foolish as men are —