Half-Sick of Shadows Read Online Free PDF

why she said that; it wasn’t true. We didn’t speak more than a word or two at a time in the morning for an opposite reason: because the Manse’s groans and whines often broke our sleep. There’s another reason why we didn’t speak: our jawbones took an hour or two to thaw.
    Our harsh weather had chapped Sophia’s red, red lips. They looked fatter than they were. She had a delightful pout. When Sophia pouted for a kiss, and when she thought hard about how to solve a problem – like how to turn the door knob with jam on her fingers – her lips formed a red bud.
    When problem-solving, Sophia’s eyebrows narrowed. She folded her arms across her chest – except if she had jam on her fingers. Problem-solving involved making herself as compact as possible. With eyes closed, eyebrows raised, and arms at her side, she presented her kissing pout while leaning forward as if lips were allowed to touch but toes had to stay apart.
    Sophia threw back the blankets and sat on the edge of her bed, slumped and shivering. Her feet were white, tiny and sharp. A girl of her age should have had plump feet and piglet toes. I saw my first plump girls’ feet when I went to school. It was a boys’ school, but girls came to partake in a sports day. Until then, I thought all girls were skinny by nature. Sophia’s feet were hard, like the stones ancient people used as knives to skin bears and lions. They wore the skins as coats and shoes because those were the days before shops.
    I knew farms, churches, and houses because I’d seen them. I knew about shops too, although I’d never seen one. Shops were where you got things because you were out of them, like washing powder, matches and bleach; those were the kinds of things Mother most often found herself out of. Father only ever found himself almost out of gas for the cooker, which he cycled home with from Farmer Barry’s farm in two green bottles, in a bag on his back. You needed money before you could go to shops. Everything costs money, Mother said and it didn’t grow on trees. Shops were far away and maybe you had to travel across the sea in a boat to get to one. There were pictures of boats in the encyclopedia. One, called the
Titanic
, crashed into an ice cube and sank, drowning everybody except Robinson Crusoe, who washed up on a desert island and ate coconuts.
    Edgar rose next. He collected water in a jug from the pail and poured enough into the basin to threaten his hands and face with damp. Sophia rallied at the noise from next door and did the same in our room. Sometimes the water froze overnight and first to the pail had to crack ice with the jug. Sometimes it froze outside, in the well, and Mother had to break it by dropping the bucket hard, or with a pole. One year she broke the bucket. The next year she broke the pole.
    While Sophia tried to wash without allowing icy water to touch her skin, I edged my feet from under the blankets and rose bit by bit, even though I knew I would warm faster by rising all at once and getting dressed quickly. I dressed while Sophia washed. Then she dressed while I washed.
    I dressed in hand-me-down-from-Gregory patch-arsed trousers, washed-to-see-through-thin white cotton shirt buttoned to my neck, and my heaviest pullover – which had holes at the elbows.
    Mother came upstairs briefly to put a Windsor knot in my black tie. The hand-me-down-from-Edgar black jacket hardly fitted over the pullover; I looked stuffed. My shoes had such a high shine they reflected my face when I looked at my feet. I took off my jacket – wrestled with it for two whole minutes – so as to feel the benefit of it when I went outside.
    Gregory, last as always, needed yet another shake from Mother.
    Father appeared downstairs smelling of soap. Normally, he smelled of farm animals. The top half of his weatherworn face was as red as raw meat and the bottom half, shaved for the first time in years, looked like bone. He did it last night while we were asleep. His greying