The Small Fortune of Dorothea Q Read Online Free PDF Page B

hammer-blow – they were once here and now they were gone. And how many other faceless, nameless ancestors had gone before them? People of whom no photos existed; melted into the shadows of history! For the first time ever I felt a connection to the line of ancestry that went before me; my life was simply one little leaf in a huge spreading tree whose roots spread far into the past and branches would reach far into the future. A shudder of excitement went through me …
    Gran snapped the album shut. ‘Everybody in that book dead and gone, except me and me chirren and you Greatuncle Rudolph, in Canada. Dead and gone, ashes to ashes. Ah well. We all gotta die one day. Now, child, hand me those albums over there. Those two t’ick ones.’
    Something about Gran made you obey. I shook off my sentimental musings and got up, picked up the ‘tick’ albums she’d pointed to, and handed them both to her. They were each at least two inches thick; one newer and the other older, battered like the suitcase. She opened the newer one. I expected yet more old photos, but I was wrong.
    It was filled with stamps, most of them arranged in neat rows, but several of them loose and falling out, some in sheets or groups of four or five, some on envelopes, first day covers, bright, beautiful stamps, from all over the world. She knew the country names by heart, and pointed them out to me: Ethiopia. New Zealand. Iceland. Bolivia. She looked at only one or two pages before shutting it and picking up the old album.
    This album seemed not just old but ancient. Its green cardboard covering was cracked and dog-eared, the spine fractured. But she touched it as if it were sacred.
    ‘The family heirloom,’ she whispered, and opened it.
    I was disappointed. For an heirloom, the album held nothing of beauty, nothing of appeal. No beautiful foreign stamps, no first day covers; the stamps in here were all from British Guiana, and they looked cheap and insignificant, bland and musty in their monotony, primitive in their production. She pointed to one particularly ugly stamp on the last page.
    ‘Theodore Quint’s – your great grandfather!’ she said. ‘Very valuable!’ She launched into some convoluted story of its origin; I listened with half an ear.
    ‘A hundred and fifty years old!’ Gran whispered. ‘Very precious. Worth millions. An heirloom. I holding it for the next generation.’
    She closed the album, placed a hand on it as if in blessing, then clasped it to her breast.
    ‘Very, very precious,’ she repeated. And in her eyes I recognised a new glint.
    I’d seen it before, not too long ago, on the big screen. Gollum’s glint.
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    L ater that evening I fled the house, leaving Gran to Mum and Marion. I slammed the front door, hurrying out to the pavement before Gran could somehow recall me. There I stopped, rummaged in my shoulder bag, pulled out my pack of pre-rolled fags and a lighter. I lit one, and, sitting on the garden wall, smoked it right down to the filter. That was good.
    Mum detested my smoking and had done her level best to stop me from starting; but I had anyway, and now I was hooked, and she had to accept it. But she had her rules: no smoking within the house. Not even in my own room. Never, under her roof, she said. I always protested, ‘But actually it’s my roof!’
    Which was true. In a twinkle of good sense Dad had put the house – which he had inherited from his mother – into my name before going berserk with his crazy trading and eventually losing everything else. He’d never re-mortgaged it, which had saved us from ruin; because it was only through re-mortgaging the house that Mum had got rid of a huge chunk of Dad’s debt. The Docklands loft, of course, had been repossessed. So it was, indeed, my house, but only in name. Rather, it was the bank’s. Mostly.
    ‘Who pays the mortgage?’ was all Mum ever said to my homeowner claims. That shut me up.
    I crushed the cigarette stub on the wall, chucked it into