The Mermaid's Child Read Online Free PDF

unlocked and unexpectedly lightweight. There were dustmotesin the sunlight. I looked inside. I sank my hands into folds of soft pale stuff.
    There was nothing there, not really. Just a lavender-bag made from the same fabric as the front room curtains, and a couple of old shirts, one white, one white with blue stripes, which must have fitted my father as a boy. These, and a pair of boys’ clogs, black, nailed and laced, the wooden soles splintery with wear. But apart from that, nothing. I ran my hands over the grey inner surface of the trunk, not quite able to accept its emptiness. No letter, no note, not even a smudged address label: nothing. And for a moment I felt almost angry. How could they have left me with nothing, without even a clue? I turned back to the shirts, lifted one, examined it unsuccessfully for pockets. The fabric was soft, smelt of mustiness and lavender. I peeled off my scratchy jumper, by now so outgrown that a clear three inches of sunbrowned belly was visible beneath it anyway, and lifted the white shirt over my head. It fell around me in cool folds. I tucked it into my shorts, then bent to unhook my sandals. The clogs were too big, but I took a pair of my grandmother’s yellow ribknit socks from the press. I tucked the striped shirt into one of her old woolgathering bags. I slung it on my shoulder. I would, at least, be bringing something of him with me.
    Bag on back, my feet somehow, despite the ache for change and proper food that was gnawing at my belly, would not take me straight to the Anchor. Instead, I found myself scuffing along the riverbank. I followed without thinking the bend in the river round to where Thrush Gill falls into the water, and turned to walk the shallows upstream.
    Half a mile up over loose rocks, then pushing through hanging branches and slithering over water-filmed slabs of sandstone. Easier going in my new clogs; no knocks to vulnerableankle bones, no stubbed toes. Half a mile under dripping mossy overhangs, dark loamy banks, then up over a rocky shelf and out into open evening sky: the buzz of a waterfall, and the pool, a single perfect cup of sandstone, worn by the constant stirring of a single skull-sized boulder in its bottom. Above, one twisted hawthorn tree and the brackened sweep of moorland up to the sky. A hawk sailed by, carrying something small and soft and dead. I stripped naked. I felt the deep moss beneath my feet, the air around my skin.
    It was my place. It always had been. I shared it with a blackbird: she bathed in the shallows sometimes. No one else ever came there.
    I swam in the cold hillside water, turning and diving like a fish, legs together, as my mother would have done. I washed off domestic dust and darkness, let the waterfall pound the breath out of me.
    And clean, breathless and damp-skinned, I pulled on my clothes. It felt oddly like putting the skin back on a rabbit. As I clattered back down the stream, my feet, still unused to the warmth and support of the clogs, glowed comfortable and secure. The air tasted sweet. A new life, I thought, was opening out in front of me. I had prospects.

FOUR
 
    â€œRight,” Uncle George said, “let me make myself clear.”
    He held my shirt bunched up at the neck, his fist pressing into my throat. I’d barely got in there: he was pushing me up against the doorjamb, he’d almost lifted me off my feet.
    â€œI’m not your grandmother and don’t you ever forget it. You can’t get round me the way you did with her. I know what you’re like, and I know how to deal with kids like you. There will be no nonsense. You won’t get away with anything. Do you understand me?”
    â€œI never got round—”
    He lifted me still higher, growled.
    â€œAnd I won’t take any lip from you either. You’re here to work. The moment you step out of line I will beat you straight back into it. If I have to, I will break you. It won’t bother me one bit. Do you