The Lives She Left Behind Read Online Free PDF Page B

like. Would you want to argue with her?’
    Ali knew all about forceful mothers. When Christine Massey thought something was a good idea, other people tended to give in. Christine had never considered the possibility that her
daughter’s preferences might not be exactly congruent with her own. When she was seven, Christine hoisted Ali into the saddle of a small pony because she had heard that riding was the
healthiest interest to cultivate in a daughter. Ali found the height, smell and muscled determination of the pony quite terrifying but that had no impact on her mother. Unable to see any
alternative to falling off this wobbly ridge of leather-topped horseflesh, Ali did so many times and was immediately hoisted back on by Christine, who saw this as only a minor interruption to the
project. Ali rode for the next six years without enjoying a single second of it and was only released when the pony died of old age, or possibly pity for her. During that time, the idea of telling
her mother she would rather not never even crossed Ali’s mind. She had developed a worried look by the time she was five and it rarely left her. In her own life, she tried to be as forceful
as her mother and could never quite bring it off.
    The three of them only rarely went back to Jo’s house. Fleur was usually busy, poring over plans and estimates on the kitchen table, or deep in conversations with builders and architects
as she rebuilt her business life. Mother and daughter shared the same roof but very little of anything else.
    The three girls grew up at different speeds and in different ways as the years passed. Lucy went on looking two years older than she really was and refusing to take any boy
seriously who wasn’t another two years older than that. Jo had turned from child to girl and those boys who looked first at Lucy would often find something less obvious but more lasting when
their gaze slipped to Jo, though they shied away from her detachment if they tried to take it further. Ali prayed secretly for some miracle of puberty that might stretch her upwards and inwards.
One winter’s day at the end of 2009, just after lunch, Jo found her sitting on the frosty grass behind the science block, with her back to the wall and traces of tears on her cheeks.
    ‘I was looking for you,’ Jo said as she sat down beside her. ‘What’s up?’
    ‘Oh, nothing,’ said Ali. ‘Everything. You know.’
    ‘No I don’t. Tell me.’
    Ali sighed. ‘I heard Chris and Tim talking. They didn’t know I was there. Chris said I’d been mooning around and he thought I fancied him and Tim said “Bad luck.”
He said I was a . . .’ She stopped.
    ‘You don’t have to tell me what he said. He’s an idiot.’
    ‘He said I was a fat dwarf with breath like a sewer.’
    ‘You haven’t got bad breath.’
    Ali gave her a dark look.
    ‘You’re not fat,’ said Jo, ‘and you’re five foot two.’
    ‘Five foot two and a half,’ said Ali and burst into sobs.
    ‘Chris Mellon is a halfwit and Tim Smith barely even counts as a life form.’ Jo put her arm round her friend’s shoulders.
    ‘That’s not everything. There’s Facebook. I’ve been getting horrible messages.’
    ‘Who from?’
    ‘From the Six.’
    ‘The sleazy Six?’
    The Six were the girls who thought they ran the school – the sharpest, hardest, rudest sixteen-year-olds in the place.
    ‘Listen to me,’ said Jo. ‘None of that matters. When we’ve done our GCSEs we’ll be out of here and going to Exeter College and this will all be a bad dream.
That’s only a few months.’
    ‘But right now, I’m here and they’re here and . . .’
    ‘And what?’
    ‘. . . and I’m nearly sixteen and I still don’t have a boyfriend and I wish I did,’ Ali wailed.
    ‘Ali, that’s like crying on Monday because it’s not Thursday.’
    ‘What do you mean?’
    ‘Your life will come along at its own speed and when you’re not expecting it, and there’s nothing you can do to