I Refuse Read Free Page B

hand, and hoisted them on to his shoulders in one parallel movement and walked over to the cart and leaned forward in a towering bow so that the garbage poured out on either side of his head. I had seen him do it many times. To me it was a disgusting sight.
    My father would never be one of the drivers who flew so high in their polished cabs not bothering to look out of the window while he slaved away along the road, not watching him while he showed off with the two bins at once, no, they didn’t, so, without an audience, he carried them, one on each shoulder, and was the strongest man in the district. No, not even then could they be bothered to look out of the window but instead sat with their hands on their knees hunched over the wheel half asleep waiting for my father to carry the bins back to their sheds and jump back on to the footplate again and smack the shiny metal, so they could drive the fifty or a hundred or two hundred metres to the next bins. He had a driving licence, my father, but they never let him drive. He never flew so high.
    He was incredibly strong. When the men stood out on the lawns in the evening lifting weights, lifting anything they could get their hands on, lifting milk churns and car wheels, lifting several at once, lifting flagstones and scrap metal and pumping it up and down until the skin on their biceps almost split, there was no one who could beat him. And so you would expect him to use his arms, or his fists, when he beat us. But he didn’t, he used his legs, and of course they were strong too, his legs, and it was logical if you gave it some thought, the way he ran up and down the road with the bins, that his legs would be strong as well.
    He used his boots. He kicked us. He kicked our bottoms from behind, and at times it was so painful, and for Siri and the twins it was really bad. They couldn’t take the punishment that I could and didn’t have the muscles back there to handle his kicks. But he didn’t discriminate, he treated both sexes equally. He kicked all four of us.
    In the evening when my father had fallen asleep with the TV still on, we got together in the room we shared on the first floor and pulled down each other’s pants and lay stomachs down bottoms up on one of the beds, showing each other the red and blue marks and the hard scabs where the skin had split and not quite healed yet, and we compared size and colour to see who had got the worst treatment that day or any other day when he was in the the mood, which he often was, and we all had our fair share, but normally it was me who got the most, because I was the eldest and a boy.
    It was sad to see the state of my sisters, and I calmed them down and said the nicest things about their behinds and said the bruises didn’t look as bad as they probably felt, and they would soon be pretty again, if that was what they were worried about. And it was. They were afraid they would not be pretty again soon enough, for it was difficult to sidle through the showers every single time they had gym at school, and they couldn’t turn and always had to keep their backs against the wall, and they didn’t know what to say if anyone asked them why they looked that way. As for me, I didn’t give a shit, and if anyone had asked me, I would have told them the truth, but they rarely did. They didn’t dare. Everyone thought I was scary.
    It wasn’t so easy for my sisters, though.
    One evening, when we were sitting together in our room, and I was about to pat them and stroke their behinds as I always did to comfort them and say they were pretty no matter how they looked, I felt a sudden
urge
to comfort them in that way and stroke them where it hurt the most, and it came in a rush that feeling, and overwhelmed me. And I patted them once and stroked them again, I stroked all three of them, one after the other, and then I turned to look out the window and my throat felt tight, and out there of course, the Easter snow lay high, a gleaming yellow