The Lives She Left Behind Read Online Free PDF Page A

with fury on her face.
    ‘I thought you’d finished with all that nonsense,’ she said. ‘All right then, little miss. We’ll get you straight back on the pills, just you see. Now you shut up.
I don’t want another word out of you.’
    ‘Don’t fight her,’ said the calm voice in Jo’s head. ‘You’re right. That’s home. You’ll be free to go there some day.’
    ‘When?’ she asked quietly.
    ‘When you’re old enough. Soon.’
    Sorrow crept through her as the land around chilled to evening and the turning wheels took them further away from wherever it was.

CHAPTER 3
    Jo woke up sure she had heard the alarm, immediately afraid she was late for school. The bell ran away to the back of her head into the dream space and she knew it for the
wrong bell, a church bell tolling wildly, not the clock’s calm electric buzz. Night filled the room but it was an unfamiliar shade crossed with yellow and the sounds were unfamiliar too
– a quiet slapping of water and a car engine in the wrong place, with the wrong echo. Remembering she was now in this unknown Exeter, she got out of bed on to a bristly floor that released
traces of a landlord’s cleaning chemicals as her toes disturbed the pile. She went to the open window, leaned out staring sideways, towards the dark water of the river with streetlight
splashes bouncing on the ripples. The buildings beyond rose towards the centre of the city. It felt no worse than York, a little better even, just another place to be. Up the hill, a distant bell
chimed twice and she switched on the light to check again that she had all her clothes ready. They were clothes from her old school and her mother had promised that the new school would not mind.
There was the map her mother had printed off for her and two pound coins. Fleur had a meeting, she said. Otherwise she would have taken Jo there, as it was her first day, but she was sure it would
all be all right. Jo looked at the map. It seemed a long way. She went quietly back to bed.
    In the morning, she took the map and the two pounds and a spare set of keys from a hook by the door and went out to find herself cut off from the city by the river. She turned right, looking for
a way across, wasted five precious minutes, then turned back in mounting alarm and found a footbridge to the far side. There would be a bus, her mother had said, but when she found a bus stop, the
names of the destinations bore no resemblance to anything on her map. She asked a young woman who looked like a student and replied in what Jo thought might have been German, then a traffic warden
who pointed vaguely ahead. At nine o’clock, when school started, her heart was pounding and she was finally in a road whose name appeared on her map, but it seemed to be a long road and the
side turnings came crawling towards her, each one refusing to fit the deceptively ordered promises of her now-crumpled map.
    On the edge of tears, she sat on a bench and asked Gally to help her. To her surprise, she felt a small bubble of laughter start up inside her, a feeling of how ridiculous this was. I’ll
get there when I get there, she thought. It has to be somewhere.
    It was half past nine when she finally reached St Matthew’s School. The grounds were empty so she followed the signs to the school office where they looked at her clothes in surprise,
consulted the computer and led her to a classroom where every eye swivelled towards her as she walked in.
    ‘This is Jo,’ said the woman who had brought her. ‘She’s just arrived.’
    It was a science lesson and the class was split up mostly into groups of three, mixing liquids in tubes. The teacher looked around and settled on the only pair of girls. ‘You can work with
them,’ he said. ‘Lizzy, look after Jo, will you?’
    The girl, who had long blonde hair, made a face and Jo’s heart sank but all she said was ‘My name’s not Lizzy.’
    The other girl, who was short, studious and quite wide, said,