House of Small Shadows Read Free Page B

humiliation the most, she couldn’t decide. But their echoes still hurt.
    In a moment of sympathy, and recognition that her burden might be greater than her own, even little Alice Galloway once asked her,
What’s it like to have no real mum and dad? I’d
hate it.
And Alice had worn a large brown boot on one foot to correct her strange lurching walk. The boot, and an eye socket packed with gauze, had excused Alice from violence.
    During a family holiday in Ilfracombe, Catherine remembered wishing on coins thrown into a fountain, and also after the candles had been blown out on an iced birthday cake, that she could be
disabled like Alice. Her adopted mother had actually cried when she told her, in all sincerity, about her birthday wish. Her poor dad had even shut himself in the garage for a day. So Catherine
never said anything like that again. The worst Alice ever dealt with was white dog shit packaged in tin foil and a Milky Bar wrapper, and given to her as chocolate by a group of girls from the next
grove.
    ‘Jesus.’ Catherine shook her head at the side of the dismal road. Its expansion had not come close to burying the rubble of her childhood. ‘Jesus Christ.’ Who took
bullying seriously back then? Maybe her nan, who persuaded her adopted parents to move away from Ellyll Fields for Catherine’s sake after Alice Galloway went missing. A relocation to
Worcester that also took Catherine away from her nan. A move that broke both their hearts.
    ‘Oh, Nan.’ At the side of the traffic-blasted road, Catherine’s eyes stung with tears. She sniffed, looked about to see if anyone in the garage shop was looking at her. Then
returned to her car on the petrol-station forecourt.
    Behind the Shell garage the red bricks of a newish housing estate stretched away across what she’d once known as the ‘Dell’. Scrub really, full of litter and blackberry vines
where adults sent rather than walked their dogs. The Dell had been full of dog mess, but local children had still eagerly raced through the narrow tracks on their bikes and sat in the two abandoned
vinyl car seats that had been thrown over the fence.
    Using the bridge as a landmark she drove through where she remembered the Dell to be, and the small dairy farm that bordered it. Since she’d been away, the farm had also been developed
into new housing, and she was soon driving across what she remembered as an eternity of long wet grass only the most foolhardy kids ventured into because of the enormous cows and apocryphal tales
of children being speared on bull horns. Once, the field had even been made available for the local populace during the Silver Jubilee. She’d seen photographs of herself as a baby in the
field, her pushchair festooned with Union Jack flags.
    The new housing estate that covered the Dell and the adjoining field had been created with identical three-bedroom houses arranged in cul-de-sacs. There were no children playing outside of them
now. Every house confronted every other house with too many windows. When Catherine pulled over and stood on the empty pavement, the windows on both sides of the road made her feel exposed and
small. Curiously, the road surfaces still looked new.
    At the western edge of the housing estate she parked in the lay-by of a dual carriageway. The rows of concrete buildings where her nan had lived, set on perpetually windswept grass, all stained
with rust about their outflow pipes and speckled with black clouds of soot near the guttering, had been erased from the earth. There was now a Tesco and another petrol station in their place, a DIY
centre, a large traffic island, and three new roads leading to places people would rather be.
    Her nan’s brownish living room with the painting of a green-faced Spanish girl over the gas fire, that looked like the front of an old car, and her ashtray on a metal stand, and the dark
velour sofa, and the door with dimpled glass panes, and the smell of Silk Cut and sausage