A Summer to Die. Lois Lowry

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СКАЧАТЬ He’s still there when Molly and I get home from school at four, and Mum says he doesn’t come out all day, except every now and then when he appears in the kitchen and pours himself a cup of coffee without saying a word, and goes back upstairs. Like a sleepwalker, Mum says. We can hear the typewriter going full speed; every now and then we hear him rip up or crumple a piece of paper, and then roll a fresh one into the typewriter and start clattering away again. He talks to himself, too – we can hear him muttering behind the door – but talking to himself is a good sign. When he’s silent, it means things aren’t going well, but he’s been talking to himself behind the door to the little room ever since we came here.

      Last night he came to dinner looking very preoccupied, but smiling to himself now and then. Molly and I were talking about school, and Mum was telling us how she had decided to make a patchwork quilt while we’re living in the country, using scraps of material from all the clothes Molly and I wore when we were little. We started remembering our old dresses – we don’t even wear dresses any more; I don’t think I’ve worn anything but jeans for two years. Molly said, “Remember that yucky dress I used to have that had butterflies on it? The one I wore at my sixth birthday party?” I didn’t remember it, but Mum did; she laughed, and said, “Molly, that was a beautiful dress. Those butterflies were hand-embroidered! It’s going into a special place on the quilt!”

      Dad hadn’t heard a word, but he’d been sitting there with a half-smile on his face. All of a sudden he said, “Lydia, I really have a grip on Coleridge!” and he jumped up from his chair, leaving half a piece of apple pie, and went back to the study, taking the stairs two at a time. We could hear the typewriter start up again.

      Mum looked after him with that special fond look she gives to things that are slightly foolish and very lovable. She smiles, and her eyes look as if they can see back into her memory, into all the things that have gone into making a person what they are. With Dad, I think she looks back to when she knew him as a student, when he must have been serious and forgetful and very kind, the way he still is, but young, which he isn’t any more. With me, I know her memories go back to all sorts of frustrations and confusions, because I was never an “easy” child; I remember that I questioned and argued and raged. But her look, for me, is still that same caring look that goes beyond all that. As for Molly? I’ve seen her look at Molly that way, too, and it’s a more complicated thing; I think when Mum looks at Molly, her memories go back further, to her own self as a girl, because they are so alike, and it must be a puzzling thing to see yourself growing up again. It must be like looking through the wrong end of a telescope – seeing yourself young, far away, on your own; the distance is too great for the watcher, really, to do anything more than watch, and remember, and smile.

      Molly has a boyfriend. Boys have always liked Molly. When she was little, boys in the neighbourhood used to come to repair her bike; they lent her their skate keys, brought her home when she skinned her knees and waited, anxious, while she was given a plaster; they shared their trick-or-treat sweets with Molly at Hallowe’en. When I was down to the dregs in my paper bag, two weeks later, down to eating the wrinkled apples in the bottom, Molly always had Mars Bars left, presents from the boys on the block.

      How could boys not like a girl who looks the way she does? I’ve got used to Molly’s looks because I’ve lived with her for thirteen years. But every now and then I glance at her and see her as if she were a stranger. One night recently she was sitting in front of the fire doing her homework, and I looked over because I wanted to ask her a question about negative numbers. The light from the fire was on her face, all gold, and her blonde hair was falling down across her forehead and in waves round her cheeks and on to her shoulders. For a second she looked just like a picture on a Christmas card we had got from friends in Boston; it was almost eerie. I held my breath when I looked at her for that moment, because she looked so beautiful. Then she saw me watching her, and stuck her tongue out, so that she was just Molly again, and familiar.

      Boys, I think, probably see that part of her all the time, the beautiful part. And now suddenly this one boy, Tierney McGoldrick, who plays on the basketball team and is also president of the junior class, is hanging round her every minute in school. They’re always together, and he lets her wear his school jacket with a big MV for Macwahoc Valley on the back. Of course, because we live out here in the middle of the woods, so far from everything, they can’t actually date. Tierney’s not old enough to drive, even if he wanted to drive all the way from where he lives; half the distance is a dirt road that’s usually covered with snow. But he rings her up every single night. Molly takes the phone into the pantry, so that the long cord is stretched across the kitchen, and my mother and I have to step over it while we’re putting the dinner plates away. Mum thinks it’s quite funny. But then Mum has curly hair too, and was probably just as beautiful as Molly once. Maybe it’s because I have straight stringy hair and glasses that the whole thing makes me feel a little sad.

      So Dad has a grip on Coleridge, whatever that means, and Molly has a grip on Tierney McGoldrick. Me, I can’t actually say I have a grip on anything, but good things have been happening to me here, too.

      I have a new friend.

      Just after New Year’s Day, before the school holidays ended, I went out for a walk. It was a walk I’d been meaning to take ever since we moved to the house, but things had been so busy, first with school and fixing up the house, then Christmas, then settling down after Christmas – I don’t know, the time just never seemed right for it. I guess I like to think that it was fate that sent me out for this particular walk on this particular day. Fate, and the fact that the sun finally came out after weeks of greyness and snow.

      I took my camera – the first time I’d taken my camera out since we came to the country – and went, all bundled up in my down jacket and wearing heavy boots, down the dirt road beyond our house. I walked towards the abandoned house that I could see across the fields from the upstairs window.

      The snow kept me from getting close to it. The house is a long distance back from the road and of course the drive, really a narrow road in its own right, hadn’t been cleared. But I stood, stamping my feet to keep warm, and looked at it for a long time. It reminds me of a very honest and kind blind man. That sounds silly. But it looks honest to me because it’s so square and straight. It’s a very old house – I know that because of the way it’s built, with a centre chimney and all the other things I’ve learnt about from living in our old house – but its corners are all square like a man holding his shoulders straight. Nothing sags on it at all. It’s a shabby house, though, with no paint, so that the old boards are all weathered to grey. I suppose that’s why it seems kind, because it doesn’t mind being poor and paintless; it even seems to be proud of it. Blind because it doesn’t look back at me. The windows are empty and dark. Not scary. Just waiting, and thinking about something.

      I took a couple of photographs of the house from the road and walked on. I know the dirt road ends a mile beyond our house, but I had never gone to the end. The school bus turns round in our drive, and no other cars ever come down this road except for one beaten-up truck now and then.

      That same truck was parked at the end of the road, beside a tiny, weatherbeaten house that looked like a distant, poorer cousin of the one I’d passed. An elderly cousin, frail but very proud. There was smoke coming out of the chimney, and curtains in the two little windows on either side of the door. A dog in the courtyard, who thumped his tail against a snowbank when he saw me coming. And beside the truck – no, actually in the truck, or at least with his head inside it, under the bonnet, was a man.

      “Hi,” I called. It would have been silly to turn round and start walking home without saying anything, even though I’ve promised my parents all my life that I would never talk to strange men.

      He lifted out his head, a grey head, with a bright red woollen cap on it, smiled – a nice smile – and said, “Miss Chalmers. I’m glad you’ve come to visit.”

      “Meg,” СКАЧАТЬ