The One Safe Place Read Online Free PDF

Darren backed into the room until the pile of junk stopped him. He pressed against it rather than edge toward the bed as his father kicked the door wide. "What did you do?"
    "Nothing, da."
    "Don't give me that."
    Darren knew that whatever he might give his father wouldn't save him. As he saw his father stalking at him he felt as if he'd already been punched in the mouth, but managed to make it say, "I only wanted to hold the rabbit."
    His father halted long enough to look disgusted and incredulous. "You what?"
    The worst thing Darren could do would be to repeat himself, yet he was unable to stop. "I only wanted to hold the—"
    The fist caught the side of his mouth and nose and chin. He felt his jaw shudder and his lips burst against his teeth as he fell among the rolls of carpet, drawing his knees up tight against his stomach and covering his head with his arms. "Aw, Phil, don't be doing that all the time," his grandfather croaked. "Spare the lad a bit of loving now and then."
    "We know all about your loving, you dirty old sod." For a moment Darren's father seemed to have been infuriated into kicking Darren even harder than he had already planned to, but then he stamped downstairs. "See to the bitch, will you, Marie," he shouted. "I'm talking."
    When the old man hitched himself across the bed and reached for Darren while groaning sympathetically, the boy struggled to his feet and stumbled out of the room. His father had shut himself in again, his mother was marching along the hall, and Darren would have gone down to watch except that he wasn't having Henry and the woman see what had been done to his face. He dodged into the bathroom to grab the toilet roll, the mirror showing him his purple lopsided mouth and the column of blood under his nose, and dabbed at himself as he ran into his bedroom, where he turned the computer keyboard on its face and planted the monitor on top of it, and stood on them to spy through the open transom.
    Henry's mother was at the fence, pushing her bracelets along her fat wrists as if they were sleeves she was rolling up while she tried to see into the house. Henry was doing his best to look convinced that nobody could touch him so long as he was with her. When the front door banged open, however, he made to flee until his mother caught hold of him. "What are you hanging round here for?" Darren's mother demanded. "Who do you think you are, a social worker?"
    "Does Darren Fancy live here?"
    "What if he does?" his mother countered, and more loudly, infuriated at having revealed that much, "Think I'd tell you?"
    "He just chased our Henry's teacher's rabbit under a car and pushed Henry over where he hurt his spine last year."
    "Liar."
    "Our Clodagh and her friends all saw him do it."
    "Little liars, the lot of them. See, he daren't even look at me."
    "You speak up for yourself, Henry. You tell her." Henry's mother gave the boy a shake that jangled her bracelets, and when he twisted his head farther aside, flicked his ear hard with her fingers. "I'm telling you he knocked Henry on his bum where he's already hurt his back being pushed down a slide, and the rabbit his teacher at school said he wasn't to let anyone else have—"
    Darren's mother strode to the gate, her red hair flopping about her head as though better to expose the black roots of its parting. "Want some advice?"
    "If you think I came here just—"
    "Stuff the rabbit up his bum and see if that makes him better. And I'll stuff something up it for you," Darren's mother said, dragging the gate open with a screech of wood on concrete, "if you don't piss off."
    Henry's mother had covered his ears during most of this, and now she moved him along the fence with her hands still over them, as though sliding a jug with a woeful face along a shelf. "Everyone knows about you, Marie Fancy," she said at the top of her voice, perhaps in the hope of attracting some support. "No wonder your Darren's like he is."
    "You leave our Darren out of it. Don't you