Read Being Small for Free Online

just to be sure that you each of you exist. With Small it was never such a problem, but even so I used to indulge the impulse consciously sometimes, and I think more often unaware.
    My mother used to say I sulked, but that was a misunderstanding, so it had to be deliberate. For myself I just thought that I got clagged up, choked off with fury, nowhere to go but inward. That it was possible to fight without being angry had been a revelation, and remained a development that I think we were both watching with interest. Far from stirring up any anger inside me – and how could it be fresh in any case, after so long a time? Nothing but dregs and ashes at best, not worth the kindling – her utter self-absorption was a touchstone, recognition, safe home again. Still, I was quite willing to fight about it if she wanted to.
    She only went quiet for a while, though, and then said, “Do you want your presents now?”
    “Well, yeah, if you’ve got ’em. I’m seeing Adam later. I just thought they’d be all scrambled up in the boxes and you wouldn’t find ’em for weeks.” If she found them at all, if she’d bought them at all, if she’d given our birthday any thought at all except to fix it as a good day for a
move.
    “Don’t be silly, sunbeam. Presents matter.” They mattered to her, that much I did know. She was always good at giving things away. And I was still half a kid, I could still be full-on child when I tried, they could matter very much to me also; but because I was still half a kid, I was trying very much to pretend that they did not. “I wouldn’t let them get mixed up with the move. They’re in the footwell, that carrier bag you were folding your legs around. I did tell you not to kick it.”
    “Oh. Okay. Thanks.” That meant no big boxes: no skateboard, no laptop, nothing that I knew I really wanted. No matter. When did we ever get what we really wanted? Maybe they were all for Small. More likely they were just what she really wanted to give us. “I’ll fetch them, shall I?”
    “No, you stay. I’ll go.” And she went, crawling back through the van’s body and stretching over the passenger seat, fumbling out a carrier-bag and dragging it into the light, puffing audibly as she settled again beside me.
    “Wouldn’t it have been easier to walk round, open the door, lean in?”
    “Yes, of course. When did I ever do anything the easy way? I had you, remember, the two of you. And chose to bring you up on my own and full-time, no man, no dumping either of you on grandparents or schools. I only like things difficult.”
    I said that was probably just as well in the circumstances, but didn’t spell them out. I had my little history of troubles and a certainty of more to come, some she knew about and some she didn’t. No doubt the same was true of her, that there were secret struggles, private shames she hadn’t shared with me. I really didn’t want to know it all. Sometimes I wondered if she had an undeclared reason to keep us moving on, but never far. Perhaps she was afraid that something, someone might be gaining on us; perhaps she was half-hoping to be caught. I never asked, for fear she might tell me.
    “I didn’t make such a bad job of you, either,” she said, eyeing me up and down. “All things considered. Open your presents. And your brother’s, his as well. Do you want them one by one, or all together?”
    “I want to lay them out, see who gets what.”
    “Child. Where did you get that competitive instinct? Not from me. Nor from your father, as far as I could ever tell. He was a man of great disinterest.”
    “It’s not competition, it’s comparison – and I do it on Small’s behalf. There’s usually more for me.”
    “Never mind the quantity, feel the wit.”
    It was true that his presents tended to be better, either because she tried harder or else because she didn’t try so hard. It didn’t matter. I got to play with them all, as he did, share and share alike. Small and I,