Love Lessons Read Free

shared my life with my demented father.
    Jane was better than a real sister. She wasn’t babyish and boring like Grace. We discussed books and pored over pictures and painted watercolours together, and we talked endlessly about everything. Sometimes we didn’t talk silently enough. I knew my lips moved and occasionally I started muttering without realizing. Grace knew I made up imaginary games inside my head and resented it.
    â€˜You’re doing it!’ she’d say when I muttered, giving me a nudge. ‘Tell me , Prue, go on. Make it up for me.’
    â€˜Make up your own games,’ I said, which was unfair, because she wasn’t much good at it.
    I’d started up a new and even more private pretend game recently, after Dad had taken Grace and me on an educational trip to the National Gallery in London. Dad had an old guidebook to the gallery and was all set to inform us relentlessly, but the gallery had long since rearranged all its rooms. Dad couldn’t match up the text in his guidebook with any of the paintings and became more and more frustrated and irritable.
    Grace barely looked at each painting, trudging with bent head, her feet dragging on the floor. She murmured obediently whenever Dad seemed to demand a response, but that was all.
    I didn’t say much either. I was flying through this new magical world of religious Renaissance painting, so pink and blue and glittery gold. It was as if I’d sprouted my own beautiful set of angels’ wings. I’d always painted wings plain white, but now I saw they could be shaded from the palest pearl through deep rose and purple to the darkest midnight-blue tips. Some of the angels’ wings were carefully co-ordinated with their gowns like matching accessories. Others had unusual, eccentric colour combinations like red and gold and black, with a white gown. One particular fashionista angel was strolling along the sandy path with a golden-haired boy about my age, holding a fish.
    When we were little Dad used to read aloud to us every day from a large and unwieldy Victorian Bible. Dad had been very religious until he had a row with our vicar. He’d gently suggested to Dad that home-schooling was all very well, but Grace and I needed more of a social life so we could make some friends. Dad blew his top and had no time for the vicar, his church, or the entire Christian faith after that.
    He put the Bible back on the shelves as stock. I was sorry when it sold, because I loved looking at the wonderful Doré illustrations. I remembered a lot of the Bible stories, so I knew that the boy with the fish and the angel friend was Tobias. He was dressed in colourful medieval garb, with dashing bright-red tights. I tried to imagine a modern teenage boy prancing about in scarlet stockings. Still, some boys wore their jeans skin-tight. The Tobias in the painting obligingly put on blue jeans and a white T-shirt and smiled at me.
    He came home with me that day as my new imaginary friend. Poor Jane got elbowed into the background. Tobias and I read together, painted together, walked together, whispered together. He spoke softly right into my ear, his cheek very nearly brushing mine.
    Now I imagined him kissing me, touching me, like the girls and their boyfriends in the magazines. But then I imagined real boys, with their foul mouths and grabbing hands, and I shuddered.
    â€˜I don’t like boys,’ I said.
    â€˜Boys like you , Prue,’ said Grace. She sighed. ‘It’s not fair. I wish I was pretty like you so boys would turn round and stare at me.’
    â€˜I bet they only stare because I look such a freak,’ I said.
    Mum made most of our clothes from remnants from the Monday market stall. I’m fourteen years old and yet I have to wear demure little-girly dresses with short sleeves and swirly skirts. I have a red-and-white check, a baby blue with a little white flower motif, and a canary yellow piped with white. They