Snow Angels Read Online Free PDF

for cod. Edward didn’t go. Was he seasick? Gil liked being there. He remembered the thrill of fishing, of feeling the tug on the line, the excitement and pride in his grandfather’s voice when he caught his first fish and took it home for his grandmother to cook for tea.
    They had both been dead for many years, but Gil knew that there had been a quarrel after which the visits to Amble stopped. His father had called his grandfather stupid and unambitious and the worse thing that he could be – a bad businessman. William couldn’t forgive anybody for that. Gil had seen him reading the morning newspaper and shaking his head over somebody’s bankruptcy and saying, ‘I knew all along that he was a bad businessman.’
    Being good at things began with school. You were sent away to be frozen, starved and beaten and then you had to be good at lessons. There was nobody to help. If you had a brother that made things worse, because he was obliged to ignore you. No one ever spoke to their brothers.
    Gil envied Edward. For a start, he looked like he should and then he was a success at school. He had lots of friends and, though he wasn’t a swot, he was good at things. His reports did not send his father into terrible rages that made Gil shake with fear and then cry with pain because there was always a beating to follow and days of being locked up with nothing but a jug of water and a mattress. He would, he thought, be very good at being in prison if he should ever do anything that wrong.
    At first he had determined to try harder, but the lessons were boring and the teachers were miserable at best. As he grew older nobody noticed that he was quite good at geometry and drawing, though he wasn’t allowed to do drawing. Edward was so good at everything else there was no point in trying. Gil could not compete. Luckily his father didn’t notice him much. With each report, the horror subsided after the first few days and his father was too busy at work to think about him. His mother was alwaysout, shopping or visiting, and when she was in she was dressing to go out. She wore beautiful dresses and smelled lovely; she wore gloves almost all the time to save her hands.
    Edward had many friends at school. Gil hated the idea. He had to sleep in a room with twenty other boys. The idea of putting up with them for more than he had to didn’t appeal. They were stupid. They cared about whether they reached the cricket team. Gil had almost got himself onto the cricket team and had to pretend not to be good just in time or he would have had to rely on other people for something very intricate and that was too awful to be considered. The games master, a creepy man who liked watching boys strip off for games but who was intelligent, said to Gil, ‘Be careful, Collingwood, or you might have to do something more energetic than getting out of bed in the mornings.’
    Gil promptly became very bad at everything and kept out of the way.
    Then, long after he had wanted to leave school, when he was sixteen, there had come a day when he had an argument with another boy. Gil rarely got into fights. He was big so people avoided him, but this time they said he had lost his temper and thrown the other boy out of a second-storey window. At first he denied it because he didn’t remember. All he could remember was that amazing rush of feeling that nothing could stop or hinder. Beyond it somewhere he could hear voices, but far off and faint and nothing to do with him.
    The other boy had been lucky. He had escaped with a broken leg. Gil was sent home for good to face his father and to be told that he could go to work in the shipyard labouring since he was obviously no good for anything else.
    It might have been all right, but it wasn’t, because the lads who worked at the yard knew he was William’s son. The very first day half a dozen of them got him down onto the ground and gave him a good kicking. Nobody wanted to be seen with him. Day after day there was the