The Looking-Glass Sisters Read Online Free PDF Page B

standing right next to you – if you’ve got something to say, you can say it to me!’
    Johan chuckles, takes another slice of bread, then slowly and deliberately spreads a thick layer of butter over it.
    I have raised my crutch, lifted it up, and now I place the end of it, with its worn-out rubber, on Johan’s wrist. He sits there, completely frozen, looking fixedly at the crutch.
    ‘Tell your sister to get that bloody thing out of the way,’ he says quietly.
    Ragna gets up, grins resignedly, pulls the crutch towards her. But I don’t move it just yet, the cold metal against his skin – a request to surrender. It is impossible to ignore me.
    ‘Fucking hell,’ Johan says as he quickly stands up, shoving aside the crutch with enough force to cause me to lose balance and fall backwards against the wall. I push with my hands, use all my strength, but gradually slide down the wall and hit the floor. That’s more than I can take, and almost immediately my legs start to quake from the sudden exertion.
    Johan wipes his mouth with the back of his hand. ‘What a bloody palaver,’ he says, fetching his jacket, which he’d hung over the chair.
    Ragna stands there in confusion, moans in despair, is about to say something, but all she manages to do is to snatch at Johan, who twists out of her grasp and rushes past.
    ‘Johan,’ she cries out desperately. ‘Johan!’
    He turns round at the door, throws his arms out dramatically and rolls his eyes exaggeratedly towards heaven. His whole body says that he cannot do anything, that the problem is not him but with the human scrapheap on the kitchen floor.
    As soon as he has shut the door behind him, firmly but with restraint, Ragna is by my side. She tugs at my arm, shakes it, pulls and tears at it in a furious attempt to get me to stand up. Sobbing the whole time.
    *
    Days and weeks go by. I glide into a soothing rhythm of calm everydayness. It is an illusion, I know that, for beneath the dependable surface conspiracies smoulder, along with my sister’s hot-tempered desire for her own life.
    If I am to retain the right to live in this place, I must hone such skills as vigilance and suspicion, and so as to mark this decision, I write these skills on the palm of my hand in capital letters.
    That’s a habit I have – to jot down what I am thinking. I immediately write it down on a random piece of paper. I battle for everything combustible in this house – government circulars, sales brochures and the newspapers that are bought every Monday. But Ragna insists on using everything for lighting fires.
     
    ‘Can you remember to buy me a notebook?’ I shout out to her whenever she goes shopping in the village.
    ‘Yes, yes, all right,’ she shouts back impatiently, and slams the door. At other times, I ask for books. ‘Ragna,’ Isay, ‘can you drop in at the library on your way home?’ She doesn’t answer, never promises anything, but occasionally, perhaps when several months have passed, she may bring home a bag or two of books. The selection is always a surprise. I suspect her of having randomly snatched them up in passing, for they deal with topics ranging from anatomy and embroidery to the history of art and the hunting licence test. She thinks I don’t particularly mind, that I don’t have any special favourites. And she’s quite right, I read everything; that’s the way I’ve got to know about the world.
     
    Meanwhile, as I’m waiting for paper to write on and new books, I secretly scribble in our ten volumes of the reference work Home University , and I even occasionally read through the old schoolbooks and novels that our parents ordered from a catalogue when Ragna and I were teenagers and they wanted to give us some sort of ‘education’. The books are in my possession – I keep them under the bed; Ragna has never shown any interest in them. So that’s how I’ve been able to fill page after page of Home University , the margins, all the spaces between