The Crocodile Bird Read Online Free PDF

ready for a meal by the time Sean came back. The packages he was carrying had grease seeping through the wrapping paper and gave off a pungent smell of deep frying.
    She had been so hungry and the smell from the chips and Cornish pasties he unwrapped was so enticing, but she couldn’t help herself. Without warning to herself or him she burst into violent tears. He held her in his arms close to him, stroking her hair while she sobbed. Her body shook and her heart was pounding.
    “It’s all right, it’s all right, sweetheart. You’ve had a shock, it’s delayed shock, you’ll be okay. I’ll look after you.”
    He soothed her. He stroked her hair and when she was just crying, not sobbing and shrieking anymore, wiped her eyes with his fingers, as gently as a woman, as gently as Eve when she was being gentle. As she quietened he did something she loved him to do, began combing her hair with his own comb, which had thick blunt teeth. The comb ran smoothly through the length of her long dark hair, from crown to tip, and as he paused she felt his fingers just touch and then linger on her neck and the lobe of her ear. She shivered, not this time from shock or strangeness.
    “Give us a kiss,” he said.
    It was more enthusiastic than he had bargained for, a deep sensuous kiss full of controlled energy now released. He laughed at her. “Let’s eat. I thought you was hungry.”
    “Oh, I am. I’m starving.”
    “You could’ve fooled me.”
    This was her first Cornish pasty. She had no means of knowing whether it was a good one or passable or bad, but she liked it. In the past she had never been allowed to eat with her fingers. There had been many gently enforced rules and much benevolent constraint.
    “When we get wherever we’re going,” she said, “I’ll tell you the story of my life.”
    “Right.”
    “I don’t know, but I don’t think there’ve been many lives like mine.”
    “You’ve got a long way to go with it yet, like maybe seventy years.”
    “Can I have the last chip? I’ll tell you from back as far as I can remember. That’s when I was four and that’s when she killed the first one.”
    She pulled a length from the toilet roll he kept by the bed to use as tissues and wiped her mouth. When she turned back to him to say she was ready, they could be off as soon as he liked, she saw that he was staring at her and the look on his face was aghast.

THREE
    O NE of the first things she could remember was the train. It was summer and she and Mother had gone for a walk in the fields when they heard the train whistle. The single track ran down there in the valley between the river and lower slopes of the high hills. It was a small branch line and later on, when she was older, Mother told her it was the most beautiful train journey in the British Isles. Her eyes shone when she said it.
    But on that afternoon when Liza was four there were not many passengers and those there were couldn’t have been looking out to appreciate the view, or else they were all looking out the other side at the high hills, for when Mother waved and she waved no one waved back. The train jogged along not very fast and disappeared into the round black tunnel that pierced the hillside.
    Liza suspected that she and Mother hadn’t been there very long the day she saw her first train. If they had been, she would have seen a train before. It was possible they had been at the gatehouse for only a few days. Where they had come from before that she had had no idea then nor for a long time to come. She could remember nothing from before that day, not a face nor a place, a voice nor a touch.
    There was only Mother.
    There was only the gatehouse where they lived and the arched gateway with the tiny one-roomed house on the other side and Shrove House in the distance. It was half-concealed by tall and beautiful trees, its walls glimpsed mysteriously and enticingly between their trunks. When Mother read stories to her and there was a palace in