Fall Girl Read Online Free PDF Page A

My shoes banged against the glove compartment, leaving little-girl scuff marks on the wood trim. I wanted to throw the ten dollars at her head but couldn’t bring myself to open my fingers.
    â€˜I didn’t like it anyway. I didn’t like doing it,’ I said. ‘It was wrong to take the money off that lady. I’m going to toss it out the window.’
    If I had thought for hours I could not have calculated a better way of hurting her. It was wrong to take the money off that lady . Now I cannot envisage a time I thought that. It was like being young enough to believe in Santa or sleep with a teddy bear. Now I think of Ruby as a young woman trying her best to love my father and fit into a family and bring up the children of a woman she had never met. Of all the things I said during my childhood, my wilful adolescence, my arrogant teens, this is the one I regret most. This is the one I ought to have swallowed.
    People often mistook me for Ruby’s daughter, and sometimes for her younger sister. She was slender with a model’s bearing, high cheekbones, coiffed hair the same auburn as mine, but sleek instead of my wild curls. She still has it set twice a week at Luigi’s, in the High Street, where she makes appointments under another name and always pays cash. She taught me a certain refinement, a sophistication. She knew neither of us should wear pink or navy on account of our hair. Her eyes are a cool brown instead of green like mine.
    She never laid a hand on me except that one day. When we pulled up outside Cumberland Street at the end of the long drive, she opened her door quickly and came around to mine. She yanked me out by my arm. Her crimson nails dug into my skin. She left the car door open and dragged me into the house, along the narrow hall, through the sittingroom and the library and into the kitchen. The kitchen is as large as a flat, with pale green-washed panelled cupboards and four sinks made from stone and hooks from the ceiling hung with saucepans and frypans and utensils of all kinds. The pantry, where the trapdoor opens, is the size of my room and filled with glass jars of peaches and pickles, bags of potatoes and bowls of walnuts. Ruby and my Aunt Ava are still compulsive preservers.
    She opened the trapdoor by the hidden rope and led me down the stairs to my father’s study. She banged on the door with the side of her fist, the rhythmic knock that let him know it was her. The door opened; he’d pushed the button hidden inside the top drawer. He was concentrating. He had his jeweller’s loupe wedged to his eye and a velvet bag lying on the desk before him. I remember the bag vividly, the plush burgundy against the green leather of the desktop, its pile brushed in a sweep by his fingers.
    â€˜Lawrence,’ Ruby said.
    He looked up from his desk. My father was also an observer: he must have noticed the way she said his name, the look in her eye, the way she gripped my arm. The loupe fell. He caught it before it hit the desk.
    â€˜Well,’ he said. ‘My little girl is back. How did it go?’
    She spun me in front of his desk and folded her arms. ‘Tell him. Tell him what you said to me in the car.’
    He raised one eyebrow, laced his fingers. I could see his pinkie ring gleaming in the lamplight.
    â€˜I just thought that maybe it wasn’t right, taking money from that lady,’ I said, after a time. I spoke to the carpet. I could not lift my eyes from my shoes. ‘I thought maybe I shouldn’t have done it.’
    He stared at me for a moment, and his face turned grey. He wiped his brow with the handkerchief from his top pocket and I knew this was to stall before he spoke, that he was waiting until he was composed. When he was ready, his voice was soft. ‘Come here Della,’ he said.
    I wished I could melt down into the rug but instead I walked around the desk and stood in front of him. He had never punished me before, not