The Herbalist Read Online Free PDF

and her mother slapped her for
blasphemy.
    In the days that followed his potions worked
a treat: warts, veins and dandruff disappeared overnight. The people wondered where he
was lodging. And, more importantly, would he be back? Some said he had sold so much that
he was already sailing home to buy a temple. I heard that from Birdie Chase. It got me
worried: maybe I’d missed my chance to get a look at him. Mind you, Birdie was no
expert: she hadn’t seen him either, too short to see over the crowd around his
stall and too achy to wait it out.
    Birdie was Mam’s friend, but she was
too old to be making any plans with. You’d be afraid to say, ‘Will we go to
the pictures next week, Birdie?’ in case the thrill killed her. Last time she went
to a performance in the town hall, in her eagerness to grab a front-row seat – it had to
be the front for the Chases – she got giddy, fell sideways and hurt her hip. So now she
was on a stick and couldn’t walk out to The Farm. That’s what she called our
place. ‘Never mind the decay, it still has a luscious air to it.’
That’s what Birdie said.
    Birdie could afford to be big-hearted – she
owned nearly every house on her terrace and she had stacks of cash. I often wondered why
Mam and Birdie were so pally. We weren’t exactly Birdie’s kind of people.
She had two Protestant ladies up for sherry all the time. Miss Murray and Miss Hawkins
were single and afflicted with flat shoes, thin voices and no men on the horizon as far
as the eye could travel. They played bridge and talked about theatre, the reds and how
great things had been when they’d better use of their legs.They
were Birdie’s kind of people. She had probably adopted Mam as a charitable
case.
    Birdie’s twin sister Veronique had
lived with her until she went and bought an identical shop in a town a few miles away.
Veronique used to drive a motorcar and visit every week. Then they fell out. It was
shortly after Birdie’s fall. Maybe the two were connected. You never knew: old
people could be terrible odd.
    Months passed and there was no sign of
Veronique. Birdie fibbed to save her pride – said she was ill and couldn’t visit
often. According to Mam she didn’t visit at all. They must’ve had a bruiser.
Twins shared the one soul, so they’d have to make up if they fancied having a good
time for eternity. I’d often heard Birdie telling Mam that riches in this life
didn’t matter; it was the reward in the next life that counted. The next-life rule
definitely didn’t apply to Birdie; anyone who wore yellow stockings like she did
wasn’t waiting for the next life to have fun.
    Anyway, whatever Birdie said, our house
wasn’t a farm house, it was a shambles. We weren’t respectable. Father was
well shook, and nobody knew this, but around January Mam began to drink too. It
wasn’t as simple as that – there were good times as well – but you get the gist:
dinnertime, the spuds boiled dry, the bottom of the pan burning and her holding out her
skirt, singing, ‘Dance with me, daddy, dance with me.’ By tea-time,
she’d be asleep or hunched on the stool crying over some well-aimed insult from my
father’s mouth. Mam called them his fits of eloquence; she could be very
sarcastic. But I think she preferred them to his other fits.
    ‘Lush.’
    ‘I’ve never darkened the door of
a public house.’
    ‘How-how-how I ask you, Maureen, is
that a virtue? Not doing something you can’t do anyway. Now, now, if you
didn’t drink this house dry, you’d have something to boast about. So-so-so
you would.’
    ‘Brian, how dare you? I don’t
drink.’
    ‘Aye,’ he said, ‘aye, Mrs
Medicinal.’
    Until she started drinking on the sly, Mam
used to try to hold things together, used to put on a brave face and take Charlie and mefor long walks with her make-up on, telling us that love was only
a cod, a luxury people like us couldn’t afford. Something that happened before I
was born had left our family