Secrets Read Online Free PDF

softening. She came over to Adele and patted her shoulder. ‘You’re a good girl, you don’t deserve this. But you must talk to yer dad. If he don’t put a stop to it soon, you’ll all be thrown out.’
    Adele was alone in the living room when her father came in from work later that same evening. ‘Where is she?’ he asked.
    ‘She went out, about half an hour ago,’ Adele said, and began to cry again. Her mother was lying down in the bedroom when she got in from school, so she’d left her in peace for a while. Later she’d taken her in a cup of tea, and got slapped round the face when she asked what was for tea. ‘There isn’t anything to eat, but maybe she’s gone to get something,’ she added.
    Dad sighed deeply and sank down on to a chair, still with his coat on. ‘I dunno what to do any more,’ he said helplessly. ‘You don’t ’elp neither, always upsetting ’er.’
    ‘I don’t do or say anything to her,’ Adele retorted indignantly. ‘It’s all her.’
    She was so hungry she felt sick with it, and there wasn’t even a piece of bread in the cupboard. While she was well used to her father blaming her for everything, this time she wasn’t going to accept it.
    Angrily she launched into telling him what Mrs Patterson had said. ‘Can’t you do something, Dad?’ she begged him.
    She expected a clout round the ear, but to her surprise Jim just looked sorrowful. ‘She don’t take no notice of anything I say,’ he replied, shaking his head slowly. ‘It’s like I’m the cause of ’er troubles.’
    Adele was struck by the depth of hurt and sadness in his voice. He had never been like fathers in books, he didn’t rule the house, and mostly he skulked about like a lodger. He didn’t talk much, seldom showed his feelings, and Adele knew very little about him because most of the time he totally ignored her. Yet from what she knew of other fathers, Jim Talbot wasn’t a bad one. He might be rough and slow-witted, but he didn’t drink much or gamble and he went to work every day.
    But Pamela’s death, and the huge hole in the family she’d left behind, had made Adele notice her father more. She didn’t want to agree with some of the nastier things her mother said about him, even if most of them were true. It wasn’t his fault after all that he couldn’t deal with even the simplest problems. He was in fact like a big, strong child, and as such she felt a bond of sympathy with him because she knew what it was like to be constantly ridiculed.
    ‘How can you be the cause of her troubles?’ she asked.
    ‘I dunno,’ he shrugged. ‘I’ve always done whatever she wanted. But she’s deeper than the Thames. I dunno what goes on inside ’er ’ead.’
    When Rose finally came home around nine, Adele was in bed. She and her father had only a bag of chips between them for their tea, as Jim didn’t have any more money. Adele was still very hungry, and she knew her father must be too. Going to bed was a way of forgetting about it, and avoiding the fight when her mother came home.
    The expected row began the minute Rose got through the door. Jim said something about a bag of chips not being enough for a man who’d worked a ten-hour day. Then all at once they were at it, hammer and tongs, Dad f’ing and blinding and Mum sneering because he had to resort to that.
    It all washed over Adele for some time; mostly it was all stuff she’d heard dozens of times before. Rose saying that she was meant for better things than living in Euston and Jim throwing back that he did his best for her.
    Then suddenly Adele heard Jim say something which made her prick up her ears. ‘You’d have ended up in the fuckin’ workhouse if it weren’t for me.’
    Adele sat up in shocked surprise.
    ‘Why else would I have married you?’ Rose screamed back at him. ‘Do you think I would have let someone like you near me if I wasn’t desperate?’
    Adele gasped at her mother’s cruelty.
    ‘But I loved you,’ Jim