Not My Idea of Heaven. Lindsey Rosa

Чтение книги онлайн.

СКАЧАТЬ a dent in one of the cars.

      I always took it too far – that was the thing. I was always so keen to impress people. I can see now it was just my way of finding an outlet. My life was restricted in so many ways that my antics were inevitable. It seemed to me that the other kids didn’t feel the same need to light fires, throw stones or trespass. They were quite happy watching TV.

      I think I got away with a lot more than many other Fellowship children did. I was always allowed to play out in the street with worldly children, as long as I didn’t try to take them home, and, after my experience with Catherine, I wasn’t planning to try that again.

      From the day I heard about the school trip I began to dread the time when we were asked if we wanted to go. It was an exciting week-long outing that happened in our last year, and all the children were taken to Wales to stay in a hostel. I’d heard about how they all had wonderful adventures together. I was dreading it – I knew I would have to stay at home and attend school without my friends.

      Mum sent me to school clutching the permission request slip, stating that I was not allowed on the trip. I handed it to my teacher, Mrs Renowlden, and sat down at my desk in the middle of the classroom. She leafed through the slips of paper checking each one and then made her way over to see me. Without speaking, she crouched down beside me so that her face was level with mine.

      ‘Lindsey,’ she said quietly. ‘Your parents won’t let you to go on the school trip, is that right?’

      I nodded. I was mortified but I wasn’t going to show it.

      ‘Is it because of religious reasons, or because of … money?’

      I considered what my teacher was asking. My family weren’t rich, but we lived in a nice house and I had all the toys I wanted. In that respect my parents were pretty generous with their money. The money that I was allowed to drop into the collection bowl at the meetings seemed to me to be an enormous amount.

      Of course, I knew what the reason was. If I went on the trip I would be exposed to all kinds of evil and would have to eat with worldly people. That was definitely not allowed. Somehow I knew my kindly teacher would find this difficult to understand, and I didn’t want to talk about it in front of the class.

      ‘Money,’ I lied.

      When I was with other Fellowship children I had nothing to hide because we were all alike. From the age of five, I found myself in situations where I had to deal with a school full of people, who knew I was not at all like them. Very early on, I decided to minimize my apparent differences, and do my best to hide them.

      My friend Kerry lived a few doors down from me. She was a year younger and much smaller, which had its advantages when we were role-playing mother and baby. She was always doing back flips and handstands and cartwheels on her garden lawn and was the ideal build for a gymnast. To me, she was a show-off, but I didn’t let her know I had such terrible thoughts because then I wouldn’t have access to her fantastic collection of toys!

      The only problem was, Kerry wouldn’t let me play with her toys most of the time. I thought she was really selfish. It didn’t occur to me that I hadn’t invited her into my house to play with my toys.

      I badgered her to let me ride her plastic tractor, and pleaded to have a play with the old-fashioned sprung pram with huge wheels, which lived in her shed. If I was lucky I could strike a deal with her. She’d let me push her pram if she could pretend to be my baby and sit inside. I’d wheel her up and down the pavement, both of us thinking that we were convincing the passing neighbours that she was my offspring.

      I may have had a beautiful piano at home but what I didn’t have was an organ with two keyboards, stops and bass pedals. How I wished Kerry would let me have a go on it. If worse came to worst, and I wasn’t given access to the toys, I’d sit on the organ stool silently banging away at the keys, pretending it was switched on. It was torture for me. They had all this great stuff and no idea how frustrating I felt not be able to play with it.

      Kerry had a great garden with a shed at the bottom where all the best toys were kept, together with the pram and the tractor. As soon as I got to her house, I’d make a beeline for that shed.

      One day I was at Kerry’s house playing with dolls in the conservatory at the back of the house. This involved a lot of undressing and dressing them in a variety of splendid outfits. It was while we were doing this that we noticed that they didn’t have any privates. How did they wee and poo? we wondered. We needed to do some research on this, so Kerry, her older sister Felicity and I all took off our knickers and started comparing parts.

      When Kerry’s mum walked in to offer us some orange squash and biscuits, she found us all sitting there with skirts hitched up, bare-bummed. Bizarrely enough, for the only Fellowship girl in the room, I didn’t feel we had done anything wrong. We were just looking at our bits. But Kerry’s mother was very strict and she sent me home. Her reaction seemed a bit extreme and I didn’t understand why she made a fuss. But the main reason I was upset was that it threatened my friendship with Kerry. If her door was closed to me, that would mean no more playing with her pram, tractor and organ.

      After that day I would often see Kerry playing in her garden behind her high, wooden gate, and sometimes I got up the courage to knock on her door.

      ‘No,’ her mum would tell me, again and again, ‘Kerry can’t play with you today.’

      Chapter Eight

       Trouble with the Neighbours

      I suppose my street was typical of many of the calm suburban roads beyond the chaos of the town centre. The trees that lined the pavements were useful to us children for hiding behind when tracking intruders on our territory, and provided an invaluable supply of sticks we used for whacking each other.

      I knew most of the neighbours, but of particular interest to me was Jim, who lived in the house opposite ours and had the largest front garden in the street. Jim was a war veteran and it was widely known that he had spent time in Japanese prisoner-of-war camps. This piece of information was passed between the neighbours, with knowing looks from the adults and unsympathetic sniggers from the kids. He was an easy target for us merciless children. With shouts of rage he defended his land and primly painted bungalow against any child or adult who so much as dared to stroll past the white picket fence that controlled the border between friend and foe.

      He had almost met his match in me, though. I could also be fiercely defensive. I had good reason to defend my family, I thought. They would not defend themselves as they staunchly avoided confrontation. Having watched Jim reverse his car into Mum’s one day, without so much as a look at the damage, and witnessed him pouring bricks from a wheelbarrow over Mum’s feet, I decided it was time for revenge.

      Gathering up as many of my friends as I could find playing out that evening, I laid the plans for the battle. Carefully splitting off the sturdy stems of Jim’s roses, we armed ourselves with rosehips and scuttled back to the protection of the cars parked opposite his house. One by one we ran across the road and flung those hard missiles at his windows. Time and again we watched the lights in his house go on and the curtains pull back. The thrill was superb. And then it was halted abruptly. We had been seen.

      ‘Lindsey! Come in, now!’ Mum bellowed.

      One of the neighbours, Kathy, had rung my mum to say that her daughter was causing trouble.

      Game over.

      Legitimate revenge was never far away, though. For most people Sunday is a day СКАЧАТЬ