Read Black Chalk for Free Online Page A

he’d lost contact with those around him, he looked into my curious eyes, batted his eyelid, and looked away. I felt an initial pang of shame, but that was misinterpreting the look he’d given me. There had been no judgement there, just acknowledgement.
    ***
    Eight years later, I can finally acknowledge it. While I was in hospital, my relationship with my mother changed in ways I still don’t fully understand. When I was lying in bed, and she was sitting by the window, I preferred to leave my raw emotions undefined. Every time pain made me wince, every time a memory had me slack-eyed, she was by my side, ready to adjust a pillow, squeeze my hand. But whenever my words circled around Eric and my physics class, I felt her grip loosen, her eyes shift, as if my allusions were making her uneasy, and I tried changing my train of thoughts until I had her comforting smile back.
    Now that I see her every day around the house, aged and mollified, I yearn for a time before the shooting. I would like to see her in her long green dress sitting on her grandmother’s old velvet armchair, shuffling through her papers, gold-plated pen in hand, pursing her lips and frowning in concentration, a soft ‘no’ or ‘yes, that’s true’ humming past her lips, her hair draping down to her chin before gathering on the nape of her neck in an unruly ponytail. I would like her to look up at James or me, and to see her eyes swim for half a second as she’d decide whether to give us instructions. I would like her to call me to her side so that she could explain what my big-brother role entailed, to hear her say that James looked up to me, only for me to turn around and see him plucking away at his guitar, oblivious to anything around him.
    Before it all happened, she was very certain of her role, and she wasn’t afraid of pushing hard to get to her ends, since she also saw them as my ends. I remember my mother walking into my room every night for two weeks in a row and asking me how my work was going, knowing full well that I hadn’t done anything since I’d discovered Tolkien.
    â€˜It’s going well, don’t worry,’ I told her without putting down my book.
    â€˜You’re reading too much. You’ve got your exams at the end of the year. You should be working every night. That’s the only way you’re going to do well.’
    I ignored her, and she ignored my non-response. I don’t think she was ever worried – she knew I was a good student – but she felt it was her duty to come and prod me. I could understand that. Even if I sometimes snapped back an answer, I was on the whole rather fond of her nagging. It’d been the first chink I’d pinpointed in her character, its discovery suddenly making her seem vulnerable, so that whenever she repeated something for the fourth time, I’d be caught between telling her off, and smiling at her.
    After a cricket match one summer evening, Jeffrey came back to stay at my place. We were out in the garden re-enacting one crucial moment of the match, just as my mother called me to set the table.
    Jeffrey was explaining why it wasn’t his fault that he’d got out and left me stranded just short of my half-century, and I was trying to show him there were perfectly sensible ways of playing thigh-high full tosses. As I was tossing tennis balls at his legs, he was telling me why what I was throwing him had nothing in common with what he’d faced.
    â€˜Nate!’ her voice cut across our play louder than before.
    Jeffrey patted back a tennis ball, and said: ‘My mum’s even worse sometimes.’
    Already a little frustrated with him, I took him up on that statement and grabbed a hard ball.
    â€˜Here, that’s what you faced,’ I said, and hurled the ball at his legs. He managed to absorb some of the ball’s momentum with his bat, deflecting it onto the inside of his groin. When he folded in