The Tankermen Read Online Free PDF

okay, but I couldn’t get into school down here for the last few weeks, and I just felt like I was under Janet’s feet, like I was a big
inconvenience
to everybody. Anyway, I decided I’d get out, stop
bothering
them all.’
    Finn threw a chip to a seagull that had been standing glaring at him for a while. Waves gathered themselves up and fell over on to the sloping sand.
    ‘You don’t reckon they’re bothered now?’ said Jed.
    ‘I bloody well hope they are,’ Finn muttered.
    His mother’s face was always sun-browned. It grew leaner, and she cut her brown hair shorter, every year. At the international terminal it had been mere stubble. He’d felt a jolt of betrayal watching her happy face. She’d kissed him, and Richard and Janet, too, she’d been so glad to be going. Then she’d gone behind the partition separating travellers from stay-at-homes. Finn had wanted to watch the plane take off, but his dad had said it was a ‘waste of time’, and Alex had been throwing tantrums every three minutes because Janet wouldn’t buy him any sweets, so they’d gone home. No-one had said anything in the car all the way; Finn could
feel
thefamiliar awkwardness among them, thick and sticky in the air. He’d felt as if he had the word INTRUDER tattooed across his forehead.
    ‘How long’ve you been gone?’
    ‘Since the beginning of November.’
    ‘About three weeks. They’ll have given you up for dead, maybe.’
    ‘Maybe. That suits me,’ said Finn, trying to decide whether the container ship was moving or not. Jed looked out to sea too, his gaze shifting around on the water but not really seeing it.
    ‘Did you want to spend Christmas with your mum?’
    Finn felt his voice threatening to choke up. ‘I didn’t want to spend Christmas with
either
of them!’ he said loudly, knowing it wasn’t true. He wanted to spend Christmas with
both
of them, for once. It didn’t have to be just him and them; he wouldn’t mind if Janet and Alex and some of his mum’s friends were there too. It wasn’t as if he wanted the impossible, which was his mum and dad getting together again. He knew that’d never happen. Whenever they were all three together, his dad couldn’t stop giving his mum advice, on everything from planning for her old age to turning taps off properly. And his mum always overreacted and flared up—somehow she had never learned Finn’s technique of letting the words wash past unheeded. Finn just wanted to have them both in the same house for a while, so that when he was fed up with one of them he could go and spend time with the other. Maybe if they were just in the same
city
, being with one wouldn’t mean the other one being totally out of reach.
    ‘D’you reckon you’ll go back?’ Jed crumpled the empty fish-and-chip box.
    ‘I don’t know. Some time, maybe. I’ve got enough money to last about six weeks longer.’ Until after Christmas. He’dspoil
their
Christmas for a change.
    ‘Might be an idea to let ’em know you’re okay. Write to them or something.’
    ‘I guess.’ Finn stirred the sand at his toes.
    Dear Gran, How are things up there? Pretty good down here. Hey, looks like the McIntyres are about to hit the wall, doesn’t it? It was only a matter of time, though
—
didn’t we both see it coming? I mean, with that fight they had right after the wedding, you just knew something was being set up. I would like to get up and see you before Christmas, but I don’t know. They’re keeping me pretty busy down here. We’ll see. Thinking of you, Donny XXXX
    Dear Donny, I am getting Sarah to write this for me, to tell you they are really looking after me here, they know how to take care of a person. When Stella put me in here at first I was resentful, but I have been here nearly a year now and really I’m impressed how well they do their job, never looking down on a person.
    (Your Gran’s just fallen asleep. She was rapt to get your postcard as always. We’re all glad to hear you’re