Me Myself Milly Read Online Free PDF Page A

happened. He’s a lot more relaxed now, though that might be due to all the dope he smokes. He even offered me a drag once, though I think he was just being polite;
he looked quite relieved when I said no. Ha ha, I’d love to see Carmel’s face if she knew. I don’t think that was the kind of therapy she had in mind.
    But I don’t tell Lily any of this, she’d just tell me I should have had some, like it’s no big deal. We grew up around the stuff after all. I got quite nostalgic when Ted lit
up. It reminded me of the old days in the house; the parties and the music. Lily and I would join in the dancing until we were so tired we’d fall asleep under the table.
    Today Ted and I talked about books. I said I’d noticed that in a lot of children’s books I’d read, like
The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe
,
Harry Potter
,
The
Wolves of Willoughby Chase
and the Lemony Snicket books, the children’s parents were either dead or conveniently not there. Ted said it was because at some point children want to believe
they’re autonomous. They want to grow up and move away from their parents and become their own person. Or their sister, I thought, though I didn’t say it. I said I thought that in books
it was probably more a case of getting the parents out of the way so the children could get on with the adventure without being called in for tea or told to wash behind their ears.
    To be honest, I like talking to Ted. He doesn’t treat me like an idiot and even if he does use words I don’t always understand, I can look them up in the dictionary when I get home.
Today I looked up ‘autonomous’. The dictionary said:
    Autonomy
    i) the possession or right of self-government.
    ii) freedom of action. From the Greek ‘autonomous’ meaning ‘having its own laws’.
    I like that. I am autonomous.
    I didn’t learn to talk until I was about four years old – at least not properly. Lily and I talked to each other but it was a weird, private language made up of
sounds and gestures. I think, when we were younger, we each knew what the other was thinking and we didn’t need to say it. If we had to communicate with adults, Lily did all the talking. She
would say, ‘We want a drink’, or ‘Milly needs the loo’, so there was no need for me to talk. Eventually Mum realised what was happening and told everyone in the house they
were to talk to me directly, not through Lily, and I wasn’t to get anything unless I asked for it myself. These changes didn’t bother me as much as they bothered Lily.
    I discovered that I could talk, if a little quietly and hesitantly. This annoyed Lily, who quickly lost patience and tried to speak for me because she was so much better at it.
    All I really remember about those early years is how Lily was always there. We played together, bathed together, even slept in the same bed. I think I thought I was Lily in a strange way.
There was Lily and there was me, but in my head we were the same person. Mum had a big mirror on the wardrobe in her bedroom and we used to stand in front of it looking at ourselves. If I moved,
Lily copied me, like a mirror in a mirror. I’d hold my left arm out, she’d hold her right arm out. The game was that she’d try and anticipate what I was going to do so that we did
it at the same time.
    Mum told us how, when she came to Bath as a student to study art, she soon got fed up with living in the student halls of residence so she and a few friends found the empty house on King
Street and moved in. Mum said it was a beautiful house which deserved to be lived in and if the owner didn’t care about it then they would. Lots of students came and went in the house, but
Mum and her friends Jeanie, Matt and Finn were always there. Mum said, after they’d been living there for a couple of years, the property market really took off and the other residents in
King Street began to complain about the squat on their doorstep. The council got involved and tracked down