The White Family Read Online Free PDF

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    He jerked awake in a sudden panic to find he had been carried past his stop, tried to get up before the bus moved again, and was blocked by the old woman beside him, gasping and moaning in her scarecrow get-up, muttering in some horrible lingo, wailing as if he had hurt her foot when he only trod on the side of it, and only because she was in his way – He shoved her, hard, and was out in the gangway, pushing his way to the front of the bus, and the driver must have heard him coming, he closed the doors and began to drive off.
    ‘Oi!’ shouted Dirk. ‘I want to get off!’
    ‘Next stop Hillesden Turn,’ said the driver.
    ‘OPEN THE DOORS! FUCKING LET ME OFF!’
    The driver stopped the bus, with a hiss of the brakes. Dirk felt good about that. So they still obeyed orders. Then the driver got up, and Dirk saw with a start that he was eight feet tall. A fucking giant. A great woolly-haired coloured bloke eight feet tall. And there were all the others on the bus to help him. Dirk wasn’t a coward, but the odds were hopeless.
    The driver got Dirk by the sleeve of his jean jacket. ‘You are bothering me,’ he said, smiling. ‘I say when this bus stops and when it doesn’t.’
    The doors swung open, Dirk fell out and skidded on his bum on the slimy pavement. It felt very cold; the damp soaked through.
    Fuck
    Fuck
    Fucking coloureds
    Dad always told us. Always warned us.

8 • Thomas
    In dirty Hillesden, the Park seemed miraculous. Just past the notice-boards, life came back.
    The sky poured in through the gap in the roof-tops. Thousands of miles of cloud and sunlight, tethered to the neat square mile of grass. Pale paths gently traced the contours of the small hillside and rounded the lake. There were only a few figures walking today, a mother with a baby, a mother with a child, a man in a tracksuit with a giant poodle, a teenager (a truant?) on rollerblades doing showy arabesques at the foot of the hill, and there by the aviary surely Alfred – wasn’t that Alfred, back where he should be? – Thomas’s spirits leapt up for a moment before he saw it was an older man, bending stiffly to peer at the birds inside.
    You would never catch Alfred doing that. Thomas had bumped into him one day near the dark wood hut with its chicken-wire windows, in which some dishevelled-looking, startlingly yellow foreign birds had just appeared. ‘Aren’t these wonderful?’ Thomas had asked him, more for something to say than from real enthusiasm. ‘Matter of opinion,’ Alfred said. ‘Lots of us think it’s a mistake.’ ‘But you always had an aviary here.’ ‘Ah yes, but before, we had British birds. Normal birds. Birds that would be happy.’ ‘I can’t remember what you had before.’ ‘Budgerigars. Pheasants. British birds.’ ‘Actually, I’m not sure that budgerigars are British.’ And Alfred replied, quite patiently, ‘Of course they’re British. They’ve always been here. My mum and dad kept budgerigars. It’s natural, having budgerigars. Whereas foreign birds – It’s not going to suit them. First touch of frost, this lot’ll be goners.’
    Now Thomas went to see if Alfred had been right, but the birds were still there, perhaps more than before, shivering at the back of the wooden hut, their tail-feathers long saffron flashes of satin that flickered against the drab colours of the background. The old man was trying to talk to them. ‘Pretty birds, pretty birds,’ he said. ‘Pretty boy, pretty boy,’ but they ignored him. Inside his brown coat was tucked a mauve silk scarf, surprising, beautiful, feminine.
    The flower-beds, so bright in summer, were drabber now, flowers-in-waiting, wallflowers, polyanthus, winter pansies, each species set in its separate bed, with a few fierce blazes of tulips and daffodils, straight as soldiers, guarding the path. Thomas walked up to the top of the hill. Reaching the crown, he saw the children’s playground, raw reds and yellows, against the far fence, and next