The Most Precious Thing Read Online Free PDF Page A

bedroom was transferred to the scullery.
     
    ‘Sit down, lass.’ Lillian pushed her down on one of the hardbacked chairs before producing the bottle hidden under her cardigan like a magician pulling a rabbit out of a hat. She looked at Carrie, her brown button eyes bright and her mouth stretched in a wide smile. ‘Me granny swears this is the best drink this side of heaven. She’s known far and wide for her sloe gin, is me granny.’
     
    ‘Won’t the bottle be missed then?’
     
    ‘Not the way they were all guzzling the beer, not to mention the whisky me da took.’
     
    Lillian had fetched two mugs as she’d been talking and now she poured a generous measure of the dark liquid into each. She handed Carrie hers and said, ‘Bottoms up, lass,’ before plumping down on a chair on the opposite side of the table.
     
    ‘Ooh, it’s nice, sort of . . . blackcurranty. No, not blackcurranty, it’s . . . What does it remind you of, Carrie?’
     
    ‘Sloes?’
     
    It wasn’t particularly witty but both girls were convulsed with laughter again, and they continued to titter as they sipped at the deceptively innocuous drink.
     
    Some time later, when the level in the bottle had dropped to half, Carrie became aware of a wonderful sense of contentment and happiness. How could she ever have thought this room was cold and unwelcoming? she asked herself. It was bonny, so bonny. Everything was bonny. Suddenly the ever present spectre embodied in the words ‘locked out’, which had first entered her life four and a half years earlier when every colliery in the country had been closed and padlocked against its workers to force the miners to accept reduced wages, harder working conditions and longer hours, was gone. The bairns she and Lillian had passed on the way to the house, little mites of five and six who had been lugging a half sack of coke they’d collected from following the coke cart for hours and picking up the pieces that rolled off, ceased to tug at her consciousness. Life was a beautiful thing and anything was possible if only you wished hard enough.
     
    She stretched her legs out in front of her, admiring the brocade of her dress across her knees; the folds of the material shone in the mellow light of the oil lamp Lillian had lit when they’d first come in. Glancing at her friend she saw Lillian was pouring them both another measure of sloe gin, her brow furrowed in concentration and both hands on the bottle as though it weighed a ton.
     
    ‘There, lass.’ The task accomplished, Lillian fell back against the unyielding wood of the chair, her mouth fixed in a wide grin. And when she raised the mug to her lips only to miss her mouth entirely, pouring the contents down the front of her dress, Carrie found herself laughing with her friend as though she’d never stop.
     
    Neither of them heard the back door open or the footsteps in the scullery, so when Alec’s voice cut through their laughter and brought both girls’ heads jerking to the doorway, Carrie’s fright caused her to slop the remainder of her drink all over the pristine white tablecloth. ‘What the hell . . .’ Alec’s voice died away as he surveyed his sister and little Carrie McDarmount and the severely depleted gin bottle which told its own story.
     
    ‘Ooh you, our Alec. Look what you’ve made Carrie do.’ Lillian tried to rise to assist Carrie who was desperately mopping at the stain with her handkerchief but she found her legs wouldn’t hold her. She subsided into her seat again, and said plaintively, ‘I’ll get wrong from mam now an’ it’s all your fault.’
     
    They were stewed, the pair of them. Even in his own intoxicated state Alec could see the girls were totally inebriated. He stared at them, his mouth open in a slight gape. His mam would skin Lillian alive if she came home and found them like this.
     
    Carrie stared back, but in spite of the dawning dismay at the pickle she was in she found herself thinking, oh, but