Heartstones Read Online Free PDF

Steve – you’ll probably be after him next, if you haven’t had him already.’
    ‘Stop it, Nola. That’s a horrible thing to say.’
    Nola didn’t stop. ‘Goodness knows what you were up to when Steve used to help you with your homework and I was trying to deal with stinking nappies and cracked nipples and getting babies off to sleep.’
    She looked down at the picture of Phoebe and David that she still held and, using both hands, crumpled it up into a small tight ball. Phoebe gasped.
    ‘No, please don’t!’
    Nola threw it at her, hard; it missed and bounced onto the floorboards and rolled under the chest of drawers. Phoebe knelt down to retrieve it and when she stood up the room was empty, Nola had gone.
    Phoebe unrolled the scrunched-up photograph and tried to flatten the crumpled paper; thick creases zigzagged the image, fragmenting the smiles, cutting across the shining eyes. She touched David’s distorted face; he seemed like a stranger, she could barely recollect his voice. She tried to remember things he’d said to her, words of affection, little jokes, intimate endearments – nothing came to her. Even the memories had died.
    She lay down on the bed, still in her coat and boots. She wanted the world to end, life to stop. She wanted to die. What was the point of going on? No David, no parents, now Nola would never want to see her again, she was all alone. She tried to work out how many paracetamol tablets she had in the kitchen cupboard – probably not enough. Could you kill yourself with echinacea and evening primrose? She didn’t even have the energy to swallow tablets. She’d only make a mess of it and end up still alive but terminally ill, making her even more of a burden on Nola. She wondered if she could just will herself to die. In Australia she had heard that Aborigines could just lie down and let death overcome them. If only it was that easy. Her eyes closed but thoughts raced around her head as if her brain was desperately trying to override her aching heart.
    If she couldn’t die, maybe she could leave, pack up and just walk away. That’s what she would have done in the past; if things got hard she got up and left. Ran away, as David would have said. She had a bit of money, but not much, not enough to get her very far in a hurry.
    Think, Phoebe, think. Where could she go? Where had she been happiest in her life? When had she ever been truly happy?
    Paddling in a pebbly stream  – the memory began to slowly develop, like a Polaroid in her mind ; hazy, purple mountains, flat sea, warm rocks on a beach of silver sand –  she couldn’t quite remember where it was. Whitewashed walls, a bright blue door, soft rain dampening her itchy Aran jumper, she scratched her neck as though she could still feel it . Red and purple fuchsia in a chipped brown jug, hot chocolate beside a peaty fire, her grandmother bent over a whirling lump of clay.
    Phoebe opened her eyes. The boathouse at Carraigmore! She hadn’t thought of it for years, but she and Nola must still own that boathouse by the sea in Ireland. Along with a legacy of a few thousand pounds (Phoebe’s had been mostly spent on her travels, Nola’s went towards the deposit for her and Steve’s first house) her grandmother, Anna, had left the two girls the small stone boathouse that had been her home and pottery studio in the last years of her life, with the stipulation in her will that it was not to be sold. It must still be there, thought Phoebe, though Nola hadn’t mentioned it for a long time. Phoebe could remember her sister’s annoyance that they couldn’t sell it when she wanted money for a kitchen extension and Irish property prices were at their highest – but that had been years ago.
    Phoebe stared at the ceiling, a hundred memories flooding back: sitting on the slipway to the sea – the rough concrete hot against her legs; picking at paint blisters on a window frame; watching her grandmother sitting at a potter’s