The Girls Read Online Free PDF

did.’
    ‘Well, I didn’t know how deep it ran. I didn’t know how bad it would get. I thought it was a phase.’
    ‘You thought you could save him.’
    ‘What?’
    ‘You thought you could save him,’ she repeated.
    Clare blinked at her eldest daughter. ‘Where on earth did you get that from?’
    Grace shrugged. ‘Nowhere,’ she said. ‘I just think it.’
    What did a twelve-year-old girl know about the intricacies of adult relationships? Clare wondered. And was she right?
    ‘I wish I had a different dad,’ Grace said.
    ‘Oh, Grace, that’s so unfair …’
    ‘No. It’s not unfair. It’s true. I wish I had a normal dad.’
    ‘But then you wouldn’t exist. You and Pip. You wouldn’t be here.’
    ‘Yeah, well, I wouldn’t know, would I? So it wouldn’t matter.’
    Pip appeared then, looking pale and shaken. She turned to face the door. ‘Can we go now? I’ve seen enough.’
    Clare watched as her daughter strode past her and through the front door. She and Grace followed behind. Pip did not speak the whole way back down Fitzjohn’s Avenue, and when they got home she headed straight into her bedroom without saying a word.
Dear Daddy,
Mum took us to see the house yesterday. It was my idea. I thought it would make me feel better. But it didn’t. All I could think was that it was like a nightmare. All of it was like a nightmare. I try not to think about it. Try to pretend that that wasn’t you on the pavement that night. Just some crazy man we don’t know. Usually that works. But yesterday it all felt really real again. Like it had only just happened.
At the house I went into the kitchen. The table and chairs were still there. They looked like they’d been painted black. There was a vase of flowers on the table. The vase was black and so were the flowers. Everything was black. It looked like it had all been cut out of black paper. Like one of those silhouette books. Except for one thing – the calendar on the wall, the one with the photos of me and Grace on all the months. It was just hanging there. Like nothing had ever happened. And it was stuck on November. It was a photo of me and Grace on the terrace in that house we stayed at in Turkey last year. In our pyjamas. And we looked so happy. And there was stuff written on it, stuff that was going to happen that week. And one of the things was that we were going to go to the animal-rescue centre to look at kittens. And I know it’s not like everything was perfect before that night. I do know that. But things can’t have been so bad if we’d been thinking about getting a kitten. And now I don’t suppose we’ll ever get a kitten. Because only normal families get kittens. And we’re not one of those any more.
I can’t write any more today because I’m feeling too weird.
I still love you though,
Pipsqueak
xxxx

Four
    ‘Do you want the bad news or the really bad news?’
    Leo stood in front of her by the hob, his mobile phone in his hand, looking sheepish.
    Adele tapped a lump of mashed potato off the masher and stared at him. ‘Oh God.’ It was going to be something to do with his father. She had guessed by the tone of his voice. The very particular flatness of it, as though he was talking in his sleep.
    ‘He’s coming. To stay.’
    ‘Oh. God .’ She poured more milk into the mashed potatoes and stirred them hard. ‘When?’
    ‘Well, that’s the first instalment of bad news. The second is, he’s on his way. Now.’
    ‘What!’
    ‘He’s just landed at Heathrow. He said he’d been trying to call for days. I reckon he’ll be here in about an hour and a half. Maybe less.’
    ‘You are kidding me! Why!’
    ‘Urgh, Christ, something to do with a hospital appointment. Some kind of operation. I didn’t really catch the detail.’
    Adele envisaged her spare room full of Gordon and his things, and not just that but an ill Gordon, a Gordon with dressings and medications and tiresome requirements around the clock. ‘Tell me Affie’s