Life Begins Read Online Free PDF Page B

lips to my father’s ear. I see the back of his head, the hair curling up from his shirt collar. He is on top of her, on the rush matting next to the dolls’ house whose roof came loose and which he has promised to fix. He is on top of her and moving. His trousers are round his ankles, his shirt tails trail over his backside and thighs. The moment holds, endless. I know what they are doing. I know because Freya has told me, giggling, as she points up under the skirts of her dolls.
    The eyes are wider, whiter. As her lips leave his ear he stops moving and turns his head towards me. But I am already running, out of the shed, my gashed shorts flapping. I race back across the grass, past the butterfly petals of the flowers, past the hole in the fence. The whip of the sun stings my head. The ground, dry now, is silent and hard, yet I feel as if I am running through air, upside-down, weightless, lost.
    Jessica had been surprisingly nice. She had let him stay up late and told him about trying to eat only fruit for ten days straight and a boy named Darren who never called. It had reminded Sam that once upon a time, before the new silliness at school about who liked whom and how much, he had got along pretty well with girls. Once upon a time, even longer ago, he had actually quite fancied having a kid sister. George had one called Matilda with puce cheeks and knotty hair who would fetch and carry for him like a slave. On one occasion she had eaten Airfix glue because George asked her to, and then not told on him, not even when George’s mum – a terrifying spectacle, eyes popping, her face livid – had screeched about dying and stomach pumps.
    It had occurred back in the days when George still invitedhim to tea. Sam had witnessed the episode in awe, both on account of the display of sibling loyalty (to have such an ally !) and the shouting – not just by George’s mum but by George himself and his little sister and the brothers, joining in for good measure. And then, suddenly, like a storm passing, or a language everyone but him understood, there had been rounds of hugging and quietness and toasted muffins. Returning to his own household, Sam had felt more acutely than ever the not talking going on between his parents – his father shaking the newspaper like a shield, his mother laying knives and forks with fierce, terrifying precision; it was like white noise, constant, invisible, deafening.
    Hearing an echo of it now, in the dark of his bedroom, Sam switched on his light. He had a favourite Astérix book that lived under the bed for emergencies, but for some reason he wasn’t in the mood. He stretched instead, to his very fullest, pointing his toes and fingertips in the hope that it might have some permanent effect on his length. His body was invisibly diseased, he was sure of it. Each night for weeks now he had been measuring himself against the babyish wall-hanging of a tape-measure that lived behind his bedroom door (a giraffe with a grinning mouth and a lolling tongue; it had occupied that spot ever since he could remember) and each night there was no change. After his nice time with Jessica Sam had felt especially hopeful, especially tall. He hadn’t even tried to cheat as he usually did, but had pressed his palm lightly on the flat of his head and kept it steady while he performed the contortion necessary to get a reading. And yet it had been the measly five feet two it always was, just by the tip of the giraffe’s big black nose.
    Staring at the stupid creature now, feeling it was staring at him , Sam experienced such a wave of loathing that he scrabbled in his bedside drawer, among penknives, flintsand other treasures, for his darts. Balancing on the mattress, he hurled all three across the room in turn, pinning the giraffe’s silly cartoon face to the wall. His mother would tell him off, of course – holes in the wall when they were selling the house. Sam mimicked her under his breath as he bounced back under