Unspoken Read Online Free PDF

days. It seems fine now. She must have taken enough of the antibiotics to clear it up.’
    ‘Could that have caused her not to speak?’
    David smiles at my ignorance but then quickly stops when he sees how worried I am. ‘No, Julia. I’m afraid it’s something a lot more serious than that.’
    Somehow I end up on the old sofa next to David. We sit for an hour, talking and drinking tea, and gradually find out that we have a lot in common. When our shoulders brush together, he suggests that we have dinner. He says he would like to get to know me. When I nod, when I agree, I realise I have gone my first hour without thinking about Murray.

MARY
    Living alone is my favourite pastime. When I say alone, I don’t quite mean alone. To start with, the house has enough ghosts to populate an entire village. The memories within these walls keep my eyes wet with tears and my face wrinkled with laughter lines. So really, despite my attempts at solitude, I have failed miserably. I am dragged through life by snatches of happiness and admit that my knuckles are permanently white. I am a skilled tightrope-walker – holding on fiercely to a wire so taut that a breath would snap it. I have promised myself that I will never fall off. Not again.
    There are the animals of course, in varying numbers – mainly chickens and goats now, and Milo, my Labrador. He’s the man of my house and in charge around here. I once had a rare breed of sheep but it eventually died, and the half-dozen ducks waddle between the marsh in the east paddock and the village pond. There have been cats, rabbits, a Shetland pony years ago when Julia was young, and dogs galore.
    Then there are the kids. Hordes of them over the years. Expect the unexpected, they said. That was twenty-five years ago when I started. A day or two training and off you go. It was a kind of medicine, although I didn’t realise that initially. As Julia was growing up, I wanted more, needed more to keep me focused, busy, purposeful. Slipped in alongside Julia and me in our content, safe, controlled existence were other people’s unwanted children. Bad children. Disturbed children. Runaway children. Frightened children. Abused children. None of them very happy children. Respite foster care, that’s what I provided, and still do. Some days I could do with a respite myself. Some days I add up all the kids in my head and realise that the total of their sum is me. They have been the answer to all my pain.
    So, like I said, not quite alone.
    Brenna and Gradin – it’s as if their parents dipped into the Scrabble bag and made whatever names they could – have come to stay for a couple of months. Their father has been abusing them since they could walk and their mother burned down their house three days ago. She did what she did to save her children – an eradication attempt. Take away life as they knew it and blow it all apart. I will pick up the pieces of their fragmented lives and do my best for the children. In this way, I am doing the best for myself.
    Sometimes it’s hard to believe this is the east of England. Brenna and Gradin come from the serene epitome of traditional English life – Cambridge, a city steeped in education and culture, opportunity and hope. They are surrounded by glorious countryside, bracing walks, the Fenlands, interesting rivers, and we aren’t far from the coast. Yet their father saw fit to shatter their childhoods – smash up their lives from an early age for his own gratification. It is the least I can do, therefore, to provide them with a little stability, comfort and love. For me, it is a way of life; for them, it’s the key to their future. Between us, I reckon we stand a chance.
    I’ve seen kids like Brenna and Gradin a thousand times before. Each time I fix one up, and gently nudge them back out into the unknown, a little part of me is healed. What worries me, though, is that there aren’t enough screwed-up kids in the entire world to make me