The Girl in the Wall Read Free Page B

George turned up the sound on the radio and opened the fridge to see about an after-school snack.
    â€œLet’s do that thing,” said Morven, “where you take deep breaths and then squeeze each other’s chests till you pass out.”
    â€œNo! Don’t you know that’s dangerous? Jesus, you could not wake up from doing that. I heard about that happening to a kid somewhere. He died from doing it with his friends.”
    â€œWhere?” she asked. “Where did that kid live?”
    She wanted to play with people who weren’t afraid of dying. But maybe when she met them they would disappoint her and be just like other kids and not want to have anything to do with her but poke fun.
    â€œI don’t know where the kid lived. Omaha? I just heard some teachers talking about it once.”
    â€œAre you scared of dying, Georgie? I’m not. I wonder if Gloria is afraid of dying.”
    George closed the fridge.
    â€œMaybe if you played with her you could ask her and find out,” he muttered.
    He walked out the front door to the street. He was so tired of getting caught up in her questions.
    During the school year he took himself away as best he could into basketball and curling and the United Nations Club. He looked after Morven; no one could say he didn’t, but there were other things that he insisted on doing to keep himself from going off his rocker, as he put it.
    Summers were long for George. The family didn’t take holidays away from home like most others in the area. Their dad didn’t take time off work the way most dads did, and their mother continued on in her usual way. There had been a time not so long ago when Mrs. Rankin still went for the occasional outing, always in the passenger seat of the car, never getting out of it, just going for a ride, as she called it, and insisting that the whole family come along. But no more, and George was just as glad. He hated the outings. They were tense and they smelled bad, like his mother’s bedroom did when Mrs. Campbell had days off and wasn’t there to help.
    The streets were quiet and lazy in the summer and it was difficult to think up ways to pass the time. He found the odd game of Work Your Way Up in the flood bowl or in the school grounds, and there was always the riverbank to explore. It would have been different if he were a boy on his own. He could have scouted out the other boys who came and went from their holidays with their families and tagged along with his homemade slingshot and his baseball glove.
    But he always had Morven with him and he knew better than to inflict her on the neighbourhood boys and vice versa. They made fun of her in the way that young boys do, and who knew how bad it could get if he wasn’t there to shield her from their taunts? All the boys weren’t like that: there were one or two that were nice to her, Frank Foote, for example, who usually made a point of saying hello. George liked Frank Foote, but he was quite a bit younger and it wouldn’t do to cultivate a friendship with a little kid.
    The length of the days didn’t seem to trouble Morven. She found enough to do. She didn’t need a lot, it seemed, and that was good as far as George could tell. It would be worse if she needed him to come up with ideas for her. She didn’t have many of her own, but those she had took up a lot of her time, as she was opposed to hurrying. He got so he could trust her to do certain things by herself for limited periods, as long as she told him what and where and for how long.
    Sometimes her ideas were a little off base, but she came to no real harm.
    Morven turned twelve in early October of 1961. She wanted to bake a cake for her mum. Twelve years ago on this day her mother had given her death, which was quickly followed by birth because of the quick-acting nurses. It was the death part that interested Morven and that was why she wanted to bake the cake.
    She planned to write