The Year of the Rat Read Online Free PDF Page B

noise of the traffic loud around us.
    ‘School was weird without you,’ Molly says, filling the gap. ‘And the holidays have been a nightmare. My family’s driving me mad. Liam plays his music really loud all
day. Jake wants a pet snake, keeps on about it the whole time. Callum keeps wetting the bed. Mum and Dad aren’t talking to each other.
Again.
I’ll be glad to get back to
school. And it’ll be great to have you back.’ She takes my arm.
    I’ve never really heard Molly’s mum and dad say much to each other, except for stuff like
Where are the car
keys?
or
I told you I’d be late tonight,
it’s not my fault if you don’t
listen.
But Molly looks really down.
    ‘I’ve really missed you,’ she says, linking arms with me. I wonder if she expects me to say I’ve missed her too. A massive lorry thunders past, spraying the puddles at
the side of the road up towards us so we have to dodge out of the way. Molly lets go of my arm and we walk side by side.
    ‘Do you go and see her every day?’ Molly asks. ‘The baby?’
    ‘Dad does. He practically lives there when he’s not at work. I never see him.’
    ‘Don’t you go too?’
    I shrug. ‘I’ve been revising.’
    ‘Me too,’ she says. ‘But it’s so noisy at my house. Everyone’s rowing all the time. Once we’re on study leave, we should go to the library
together.’
    We walk in silence for a while.
    ‘Maybe I could come with you to visit the baby some time,’ Molly says. ‘I can’t wait to see her.’
    I imagine Molly seeing The Rat for the first time. I imagine her face lighting up, softening into a smile as she whispers to her—
    ‘No,’ I say. ‘You can’t.’
    Molly looks confused. ‘When she’s well enough I mean.’
    ‘You might as well leave me here,’ I say. ‘I’ll get the bus.’
    ‘You sure?’ She’s disappointed. ‘I really don’t mind walking with you.’
    ‘There’s one coming now,’ I say, spying a bus in the distance, and before she can say anything more I dash out across the road. Molly waves as I stand in the queue, and then
turns and walks off in the opposite direction. She’s out of sight when the bus eventually pulls up.
    I decide to walk after all.
    By the time I get back to the house, the sun is shining. I go inside to peel off my damp clothes and get dry ones on, still thinking about Mum, how sure I’d been that it
was her. I feel panicky suddenly. She’s slipping away from me, every second taking me further away from her. What if I wake up one day and I can’t remember what she looked like?
Already, sometimes, I have to concentrate to think of what she sounded like when she spoke, to try and hear it in my head. I have to keep her with me.
    I remember the box in her study. PERSONAL it had said. I hurry through and stare at it. What’s in there? I shoo a deeply unimpressed Soot off the lid of the box. Then I take a deep breath
and carefully peel back the brown tape that seals it.
    Inside, there are letters and cards, photos and postcards, bunches of them tied up with string or ribbon or held with elastic bands, some in old shoeboxes, others loose. There must be hundreds
of them. I stare at them, overwhelmed, hardly able to breathe. It’s like the story of Mum’s life all here in this box. I pick out one of the envelopes of photos and look through them.
They’re all muddled up, some of Mum when she was a little girl and then a teenager, one of her with Nanna Pam before she got ill. Looking at them makes me cry, but I keep on looking.
    The last picture is of Mum lying in a hospital bed, looking young and exhausted, holding me, all new and crumpled. Not like The Rat though. I look like a real baby. I think of The Rat in her
funny plastic box with the tubes going in and out of her. Is she still in it? Does she still look the same? I examine the photo carefully. Dad wasn’t there; he and Mum had been friends since
before I was born, but they didn’t get together until a few months later.