House of Small Shadows Read Free Page A

and coming home, she’d moved back within range of the unhappiest period of
her life: the beginning. As if she had been driven back by one of the unconscious compulsions her therapists had been so keen to reveal as a mainstay in her life.
    Catherine tried to stayed focussed on the road, but wondered again if her childhood unhappiness had been the reason she’d gone to a university in Scotland, and then to another three
distant cities to work after graduation. That she’d spent her entire adult life running from ‘The Hell’.
    But here you are, girl
.
    She picked up the A road that would lead her into Ellyll Fields, and her feelings immediately smouldered beneath a messy collage of actual recollections and her memories of photographs from
family albums. And in the anxious mix came a force of apprehension that made her breathless.
    But she could not deny she was strangely excited to be going back
there
too. Excitement that felt reckless. An unstable desire to revisit a strangeness in her childhood that she
considered the only relief in a thoroughly miserable introduction to life.

 
FOUR
    Catherine stood at the edge of a petrol-station forecourt that had not been in her childhood. The only thing she recognized was the humpback bridge over a stream of shallow
brown water, referred to as a river when she was a child. Though even the bridge had been lowered and widened to allow freight lorries to shudder through Ellyll Fields in gusts of dusty wind.
    The little paper shop where her nan had bought her ten-pence mixtures of sweets in a white paper bag was no more. Gone along with the little plastic boy out front, who’d held a collection
box and had a spaniel at his feet. Beside the Wall’s ice-cream sign made of tin, covered in faded pictures of ice lollies that once made her mouth water, the plastic boy had stood sentinel in
all weathers. She’d often been allowed to put a half-penny coin inside his box.
    Catherine wondered what happened to all of the crippled boys and girls with their spaniels, who once stood outside sweet shops. Where the paper shop had been was now a decelerating lane into the
petrol station.
    There had been a chemist’s and a clothes shop beside the newsagent’s. Yellow cellophane behind their windows used to remind her of Quality Street chocolates that came out at
Christmas. In the chemist’s she’d received her first pair of milk-bottle glasses in black NHS frames. Three decades would pass before that particular style of spectacle frame was
considered cool. Fashion had not been on her side when she actually had to wear them.
    And in the clothes shop she had been bought her first pair of school shoes. Even recalling these shoes made her breath catch. Nor for the first time was she astonished at what remained in her
memory.
    Few had worn that type of sandal. Even fewer had liked them. They had been brown and made by Clarks. Something else that had since become popular. The certainty of the adults surrounding her in
the shop, that the sandals were a satisfactory purchase, nearly gave her the same confidence at the point of sale. Once home with the box and the horrible sandals in their bed of tissue paper,
thoughts of the coming school term and what awaited her had created an empty feeling in her stomach, a cold tingling space in which no food would settle.
    Her instincts about the sandals had been correct and she came to hate them. She’d cut them with scissors, but ended up going to school in damaged shoes. She’d also worn the sandals
at weekends, so news of school shoes being worn in public on a Saturday had whipped round the playground. Everyone thought she did things like that because she was adopted.
    Dopted! Dopted! Dopted!
    In this dreary place of concrete and tarmac, built over her childhood, a burst of the chant returned to her mind. Followed by another inner refrain of
Pauper! Riffy Pauper! Pauper! Riffy
Pauper!
Which of the chants had scalded her with shame and