Holes for Faces Read Online Free PDF

if I’m directing the thought at someone who’s judging them, but nobody is peering over or under the railings on the promenade or out of the apartments across it. Nevertheless I feel overheard in declaring “I think you’ve both done very well. I couldn’t choose between you.”
    I’ve assumed the principle must be to treat them as equally as possible—even their names seem to try—but just now dissatisfaction is all they’re sharing. “I’m bored of this,” Gerald says and demolishes several of his rickety castles. “I want to swim.”
    “Have you brought your costumes?”
    “They’re in our room,” says Geraldine. “I want to swim in a pool, not a mucky river.”
    “We haven’t got a pool here any more. We’d have to go on the train.”
    “You can take us,” Gerald says. “Dad and mum won’t mind.”
    I’m undismayed to give up sitting on the insidiously damp sand or indeed to leave the loudly peopled beach once I’ve persuaded the twins not to abandon their buckets and spades. I feel as if the children are straining to lug me uphill except when they mime more exhaustion than I can afford to admit. They drop the beach toys in my hall together with a generous bounty of sand on the way to thundering upstairs. After a brief altercation they reappear and I lead them down to the train.
    Before it leaves the two-platformed terminus we’re joined by half a dozen rudely pubertal drinkers. At least they’re at the far end of the carriage, but their uproar might as well not be. They’re fondest of a terse all-purpose word. I ignore the performance as an example to the twins, but when they continue giggling I attempt to distract them with a game of I Spy: s for the sea on the bare horizon, though they’re so tardy in participating that I let it stand for the next station; f for a field behind a suburban school, even if I’m fleetingly afraid that Gerald will reveal it represents the teenagers’ favourite word; c for cars in their thousands occupying a retail park beside a motorway, because surely Geraldine could never have been thinking of the other syllable the drinkers favour; b for the banks that rise up on both sides of the train as it begins to burrow into Birkenhead… I don’t mean it for Beryl, but here is her house.
    Just one window is visible above the embankment on our side of the carriage: her bedroom window. I don’t know if I’m more disturbed by this glimpse of the room where she died or by having forgotten that we would pass the house. Of course it’s someone else’s room now—I imagine that the house has been converted into flats—and the room has acquired a window box; the reddish tuft that sprouts above the sill must belong to a plant, however dusty it looks. That’s all I’ve time to see through the grimy window before the bridge I used to cross on the way to school blocks the view. Soon a station lets the drinkers loose, and a tunnel conducts us to our stop.
    The lift to the street is open at both ends. It shuts them when Geraldine pushes the button, her brother having been promised that he can operate the lift on our return, and then it gapes afresh. Since nobody appears I suspect Gerald, but he’s too far from the controls. “Must have been having a yawn,” I say, and the twins gaze at me as if I’m the cause. No wonder I’m relieved when the doors close and we’re hoisted into daylight.
    As we turn the corner that brings the swimming pool into view the twins are diverted by a cinema. “I want to see a film,” Gerald announces.
    “You’ll have to make your minds up. I can’t be in two places at once. I’m just me.”
    Once she and her brother have done giggling at some element of this Geraldine says “Grumpo.”
    I’m saddened to think she means me, especially since Gerald agrees, until I see it’s the title of a film that’s showing in the complex. “You need to be twelve to go in.”
    “No we don’t,” they duet, and Gerald adds “You can take