The Last Gift Read Online Free PDF Page A

the time that Dad’s job was probably a kindness by the store and that he probably received poor wages. That was something she worked out for herself when she thought about him later.
    At home, Dad was always fixing something, pottering he called it, and he smoked a pipe. They called her Mary and it was only much later that she learned that her name was Maryam. The eldest of Mum and Dad’s three girls was Maggie. Maggie’s name was always on Mum’s lips: fetch this, stop that, you’ll come to no good, that’s for sure. The other girl was Gill and she was not well. The children were allowed to sit in the living room while their parents listened to the radio after tea. Dad liked to have one or other of the girls sitting on his lap, and he stroked them and kissed them on the cheek and called them you little nig nog. At seven in the evening they were all sent to bed, even if the sun was shining. She did not remember being hit or being shouted at, although Maggie was, for answering back and for being nosy. She used to peep through keyholes and rummage in forbidden drawers. Mum said there was nothing worse than someone who was nosy. Nosy people caused all the trouble in the world.
    There was an outside flushing toilet just beside the back door. The toilet door did not fit the frame. There was a large gap at the top and bottom, and Maryam remembered times when there was a skin of ice in the toilet bowl first thing in the morning. The toilet had an animal smell, as if something else lived in there, and she was terrified of using it after dark. By the time she was five, the other children had been sent away. Mum explained that they had been adopted and now had families of their own. They belonged to someone. She asked five-year-old Maryam if she would like to stay with them for good. Maryam said she would. She did not really know what she was being asked. It had not occurred to her to wonder if there was anything different about the way she lived with Mum and Dad compared to the way anyone else lived. It had not occurred to her that she could be sent away from them.
    But when her mum and dad asked to keep her for good, they were not allowed to because they were too old. Her mum grumbled about that for days, describing to Maryam the stupidity of saying they were too old to adopt one child, a child they loved like their own, when they weren’t too old to bring up three as their fostered children. Dad said he was flabbergasted. He always said that when he thought something silly had happened. They even considered appealing, but when this idea came up, Maryam was taken away from them, because the social workers said the whole episode was upsetting the child. That was how she lost Mum and Dad. A man and a woman came for her in a car and took her away, and she had no idea because Mum was talking to her in her usual way as if nothing strange was happening.
    Maryam was fostered with another family. She did not remember very much about that family. She thought something bad happened there to the other child they were looking after, a boy older than her who looked hot and often trembled. Their house was cold too but it also smelled. The windows were never opened and the beds smelled bad. Her new father was a big man and when she got in his way he pushed her away hard. Once he threw his beer at her because she was crying. Her mother was thin and had long hair, and was always hurrying them and tugging them, and telling them they were the bane of her life. When she thought back over her childhood, it seemed as if she was there for a very short time, but when she counted carefully in later years she knew she must have been there for a good while because she started school when she was with them. Maybe she just did not want to remember.
    Her memory was very confused about this time. She stayed with other families but her recollections were vague. Sometimes she was hit, she remembered that, and once she was locked in a room on her own all night