Frozen Billy Read Free Page A

it, you mean? What, and have to look over my shoulder till the night that I find myself kicked in the gutter?’
    Will shrugged. ‘Invent a fresh patter of your own, then.’
    â€˜Easy for you to say! Talk pours out of you. Your mother says you could get a butcher talking about the price of herrings.’
    I held my breath. Still, sometimes, talk of Mother had poor Will in tears. But that night he took it bravely. ‘And I’ve a mouth as wide as Frozen Billy’s, she says, that clacks open and shut just as often!’
    I shuddered, glad it wasn’t true for fear I would be haunted by my own brother. I watched as, sighing, Uncle Len laid Frozen Billy back in the long pine carrying box that looks like a coffin. (Oh, how I wished it were!) It was the dummy’s face that haunted me. His cold dead staring eyes. They clicked shut the moment Frozen Billy was laid out flat. But sometimes, if I knocked the edge of his carrying box with my broom, they opened to stare. That’s why, when Uncle Len went out, leaving the box lid open, I’d run to cover the dummy’s face with the tablecloth from the cupboard. Mostly, when I heard Uncle Len’s boots on the stair, I’d have time to whip it off again.
    Sometimes I didn’t.
    â€˜You’ve wrapped poor Billy in his shroud again, I see.’
    â€˜I was sweeping, Uncle Len. I thought it would keep the dust off.’
    â€˜You’re a good girl, Clarrie.’
    Everyone said that to me. The teachers, when I was at school. The vicar, when he gave me a prize (for ‘Endeavour’). Mrs Trimble and Miss Foy. All, ‘You’re a good girl, Clarrie,’ as if I were folded up, all clean and neat, like a handkerchief in a pile. No trailing edges. No bits sticking out.
    But that’s not how I felt. No. Somewhere deep inside, there was an explosion waiting to happen. I had the strangest dreams. I’d lie (all neat and tidy) in my bed. But in my mind’s eye I was holding hands with Father. We strode together over huge dry plains. Brilliant sunsets blinded us. Hot winds blew in my face.
    â€˜Look at it!’ Father would be saying. ‘A country as wide as a world. A place in which you can do anything. This is a land for fresh starts and brave people!’
    My heart turned over and I could not wait.
    I keep my dreams a secret. Will tells his. Like everything to do with Will and words, they are a conjuring trick, a razzle-dazzle. You’re not sure if the picture rising in your brain is right, exactly; but you can see it, clear as paint.
    He can write letters too. When I sat down to pen my lines to Mother, the words flew out of my head. How could I tell her how I spent the days after I left school to fill the place she left? I couldn’t write of selling thimbles and cottons, then trailing home to black the grate and darn the stockings and scrub and clean and cook. How would it interest her to read of something that she knew so well? Who’d want to look at a picture of the back of their own hand?

    So, though I never went to school again after the telegram came, and should have done my best to keep up with my learning, instead it was Will I set down every Sunday – and, if he was restless, some nights in between – to write to Mother.
    Words rush to Will. He’d pick up the pen, stare at the wall for a moment, and then he’d be off, like a hare round the race track.
    Today, Clarissa put on her best hat to go out, and Uncle Len chucked her under the chin. ‘Clarrie,’ he told her. ‘You’re such a beauty, you’d look at home under a silk parasol!’
    Then Uncle Len stuck out his elbow. Clarrie rested her hand on his arm just like a lady, and they tripped down the stairs.
    â€˜It wasn’t like that,’ I reminded Will. ‘What Uncle Len did say was, “Who do you think you are, prancing about in that fine hat? Lady Muck-on-Toast?” ’
    Will didn’t