Little Sister Read Online Free PDF Page B

climbed in.
    ‘You should be grateful.’ He pointed at her in the passenger seat. ‘You will be too. The pair of you. If it wasn’t for me—’
    ‘We know, Simon,’ Kim insisted from the back. ‘You don’t need to tell us.’
    ‘We’re grateful,’ Mia added.
    His eyes were bright and anxious and greedy.
    ‘One word from me and you’re back in Marken. Or somewhere worse. Years before they let you out again.
Years.
They’ll split you up. Probably never see each other
again.’
    ‘Very grateful,’ Mia repeated.
    ‘Get on with it then,’ Klerk ordered. ‘Had enough of your teasing.’ He nodded at the back seat. ‘And she’s straight after.’
    ‘Sure,’ Mia said and didn’t move.
    A sound then. Klerk couldn’t believe his ears. It was Kim behind him, singing in that pure clear voice of theirs. The kid’s tune they’d performed back in Marken.
    Draai het wieletje nog eens om.
    Turn the wheel around again.
    ‘For Christ’s sake,’ he grunted. Are you two little bitches listening to a word I—?’
    Then he saw the thing Kim was dragging out of her waistband, knew what it was straight away too. One of the knives the staff used in their private canteen. Metal, unlike the plastic cutlery they
allowed the patients.
    This one looked brighter, sharper than any he’d ever seen, as if they’d been working on it for ages, planning for this moment.
    ‘Girls—’
    Kim sang something else.
    Love is like a chain that binds me.
    Mia tapped the windscreen – one two three – and came in note perfect.
    Love is like a last goodbye.

8
    As the summer sun faded over the water they waited by the main road for the bus from Marken to the city. There were two hundred euros in Simon Klerk’s wallet. Maybe
nurses didn’t get paid much.
    ‘The pills,’ Kim said and both of them retrieved four weeks of medication carefully stashed inside old shampoo bottles, laughing as they emptied the multicoloured tablets on the
grass.
    Twenty minutes later the bus arrived. Just two people on it with the driver. Four euros each for two tickets to Amsterdam. They sat together at the back as they drove though the flat green
fields criss-crossed by glimmering channels of water.
    Waterland.
    Earth that once was sea until men came along and tamed the vast, relentless expanse of ocean, reclaiming the land as polder, kept whole by dykes and dams. Not that the water, the sweet green
water, ever went away. They’d grown up with that idea, seen their father and his brother fish for the diminishing supply of eels, in the lake and in the dykes. Theirs was a world where
solitary herons stood like grey guardians, spear-like beaks at the ready, always watching from the margins. Where life teemed beneath the emerald surface and nothing was quite what it seemed.
    Mia whispered in her sister’s ear as they approached the town of Monnickendam, tantalizingly close to home. She’d retrieved a memory from when they were tiny, a precious one, full of
meaning. It was a warm day that last summer when they were out in the old Renault with their mother. Somewhere close to where the bus now ambled they saw them: a fat and happy duck with her chicks
standing by the side of the road, waiting for a safe moment to cross.
    ‘You remember?’ Mia asked.
    ‘Of course I do!’ Kim answered, not cross, just offended by the thought she might have forgotten.
    The duck had a plump breast, puffed out proudly in front of her. The chicks looked like tiny black balls of furry feathers.
    Their mother had slowed the car then stopped. All three girls in the back had put their hands over their mouths to stifle their giggles as Freya wound down the window, stuck her head outside and
called, in a firm but friendly voice, ‘After you, Mother Duck. Take care of your young ones.’
    Then the bird had lifted her beak, quacked something, and the tiny band had waddled from the lake side of the road to the dyke opposite.
    ‘That,’ said their mother as they watched the