Christmas in the Snow Read Free Page B

crayon sketches of rainbows and bright pink stick people with hair that was seemingly always worn in bunches and feet that pointed
outwards, Mary Poppins style. In year two, she had seemingly moved on to a craze for pigs – page after page was filled with profile images of them, their tails curling extravagantly, and even
her friend – Codi – had drawn her renditions of pigs for her too, as gifts.
    ‘Ha! Listen to this . . .’ Isobel laughed, reading from her own year-nine report card: ‘“Isobel is a likeable rogue.”’
    ‘Sounds like they had the measure of you,’ Allegra chuckled. ‘Who called you that?’
    ‘Mr Telfer.’
    ‘Oh God, Smellfer! Poor man, having you in his class!’ she guffawed. ‘Stacey Watkins always deliberately wore a purple lace bra under her white shirt, just to make him blush
when he had to tell her off about it, so God only knows how he coped with having
you
for a year.’
    Isobel paused and frowned. ‘Well, I’m not sure he did. Didn’t he retire soon after?’
    Allegra shrugged as she moved on to some other workbooks and scanned her academic progress with detached eyes; tall looping letters that filled two lines were repeated across pages and pages as
she finally learned to stop writing ‘d’ as ‘b’ and got her ‘j’ tail to hang below the line. Dark HB spiderwebs filled the corners – something she read as a
sign she’d finished ahead of the class, although the red pen marks through them suggested the teacher had thought otherwise. Flicking through the pages more quickly so that the contents
flashed past like a time-lapse film, she saw her struggle to write ‘3’ the right way round be resolved, only to hit a wall with division and the nine times table . . . And all the way
through, comments in red pen about ‘not concentrating’, ‘looking out of the window’, ‘giggling with the person next to you’, ‘can do better’,
‘try harder’, ‘take pride in your work’ . . .
    ‘Oh dear,’ Isobel groaned, rolling her eyes as she showed Allegra a history-test mark from year twelve.
    ‘Eleven per cent?’ Allegra asked in disbelief. ‘Iz, that is truly pathetic.’
    ‘Yeah, ’cos I’ve really needed to know about the repeal of the Corn Laws as an adult,’ Isobel replied ironically, before closing the book with a light slap and tossing it
dismissively on the floor beside her. ‘Honestly,
I
am so not going to be a tiger mum to Ferds. I will not give him a hard time if he can’t . . . I dunno, conjugate irregular
verbs or do fractions. I mean, half this stuff they make you learn you never even hear about again.’
    Allegra paused. ‘Well, to be honest, Iz, we do use fractions in daily life, and I’ve always found it useful being able to speak French.’
    ‘Yes, but you’re not normal, Legs. What you do for a living, well, it’s not a realistic comparison, is it?’
    Allegra sighed but didn’t reply. She was too used to her little sister always viewing her as the exception to the rule – professional success meant things like failure, despair,
disappointment, heartbreak never happened to her. Apparently.
    She carried on flicking through the workbooks, following her own progress with curious detachment, trying to remember the girl she’d been when filling in these pages. But the rainbows and
pigs, which segued in middle school to arrow-shot hearts and bubble letters of boys’ names, struck no chord. She couldn’t remember being her. She couldn’t remember ever having
felt the carelessness that the consistent average of 45 per cent in the weekly tests suggested.
    Only when she got to the senior-school books did bells start to ring. She remembered cracking geometry. And she saw how noticeably her writing tightened up: no more HB spiderwebs in the corners,
no more rainbows, a weekly test average that shot up from 45 per cent to nearer 90.
    ‘Oh my God, I’d forgotten about this. Look.’ Isobel turned her book round to show a