The Lie Read Online Free PDF Page B

towards the bay and the sea comes out in patches of turquoise, where the white sand lies beneath the water. There’s a lugger bucking its way around the Island, where the swell is high. The harbour, of course, is hidden.
    The Ancient Mariner is a strange choice of poem for children, you might think. We learned reams of it, the year I was ten, before I went to work, and it stayed in my head during the long days at Mulla House. There was Mr Roscorla, the gardener, and another boy, older than me, but we were always set to work apart so that we couldn’t waste time. I liked the work but it was lonely. All the hymns and poems I’d learned at school came alive inside my head. Even when I was in company, the rhythms wouldn’t leave me alone.
    I would chant verses aloud to Frederick, as we sat propped against the harbour wall. It was his summer holiday. I worked Saturday mornings until one, but not the afternoons. He brought sandwiches, and so did I. His were beef, thickly sliced, black-edged and pink inside. It came from a sirloin joint, larded with its own fat. He would bring gingerbread in waxed paper, and cherries. I had bread and cheese and a slice of heavy cake. I don’t know which was the more delicious. I’d given my wages to my mother and she had given me back a penny. I was hard-working and learned quickly. Mr Roscorla, who was a fair man, let me plant a potato patch behind the greenhouses. I paid for seed potatoes against my wages, and took home eight stone of potatoes the first year.
    Oh! dream of joy! is this indeed
    The light-house top I see?
    Is this the hill? is this the kirk?
    Is this mine own countree?
     
    I made the hill and the lighthouse and the church into our own, inside my head, as I am sure we all did. The classroom hummed with our repetitions. In my mind the ship full of dead men sailed by the Garracks and Giant’s Cap, past the Island and into harbour. Every plot of land in the town and the country round about belonged to others, yet it was all mine, every roof and furze bush, every grain of sand. The sun soaked us through as we lay propped against the harbour wall, and we were utterly content.
    I’d told Frederick that he must read The Ancient Mariner, and he’d found a Coleridge in the library of books that his father had bought, rows of them, all in the same livery. It lay on the sand beside us, and after we’d finished eating, he picked it up and began to read. He came to the lines I could hardly bear, even as badly as Frederick read them:
    Like one, that on a lonesome road
    Doth walk in fear and dread,
    And having once turned round walks on,
    And turns no more his head;
    Because he knows, a frightful fiend
    Doth close behind him tread . . .
     
    I reached over, snatched the book away from him and shut it up.
    ‘You don’t really believe there’s any such thing as a fiend?’ Frederick demanded, with the lazy scorn he was beginning to learn at his school. ‘It’s all superstition.’
    ‘It’s in the Bible,’ I countered, though it wasn’t the Bible that made me shudder. ‘Besides, what do you know? I’d like to see you walk back alone from Mulla House across the moor on a winter evening, when the light’s almost gone. You get lugged about everywhere by pony and trap, with a lantern.’
    My words stung Frederick satisfactorily.
    ‘I can beat you in a race any day, you ass!’ he said, but it was feeble. I had won. He might bamboozle me with the rules of a queer game called Fives, but I was the hardened venturer, alone on the road in the dark. I couldn’t get the words of the poem out of my head. After Frederick and I had parted that evening, they drummed in me all night, and for weeks afterwards. I didn’t dare turn on the road, even when it was white with summer dust and the sun was high.
    I must not let my mind jump from point to point. It’s time to go inside, fill the pot with water and make soup with potatoes, a handful of barley and chives. Mary Pascoe’s block of salt