Read Counting Stars for Free Online

Jarrow Grammar School. There were scores of us there, ranked and registered in the yard by district and school and name. Ban the Bomb and great Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament symbols were painted on the corrugated roofs of the outside classrooms. Stern teachers stood around us like warders. Even in the toilets we were watched. I stood dazed in there, stared at myself in a cracked mirror, saw the baby and the boy in me, saw the images of my parents upon me. Someone yelled at me to move, to get out. As I stumbled past him he shoved me on my way.
    When I began to write in the regimented hall, in a silence broken by scared breathing and the padding feet of proctors, I began to be released. I knew, as Dad had said, there was nothing for me to worry about, that I would be rewarded.
    I passed, and the uniform was gray: gray flannel blazer with a badge of battlements and lances, gray flannel cap, gray shorts and socks. The blazer slopped down over my shoulders, the shorts kept slipping down across my hips. I stood at the center of the family and they smiled and giggled. Dad put his arm around me and said who knew what wonders time would bring. He took me around the town in his Austin. He burst in on our relatives and called down their congratulations upon me. They laughed at my shyness and pressed coins in my hand. They poured glasses of beer for Dad. His own father told me he’d seen it in me as soon as I was born.
    Dad took me to Miss Golightly to have tucks sewn into the shorts. He left me there and walked around the corner to the Columba Club. She beamed with joy, kissed my cheek, said she’d thought I’d left her.
    She stood me before her and tugged my uniform into place.
    She wore a battered cardigan. The flesh on her cheeks was sagging and wrinkled. There was a vague scent of urine in the house. When she began to tack my shorts with pins she trembled. When I felt her fingers on my skin, I thought of what Kev had said and I cursed myself for it. I sat with a towel around me while she held the shorts in her hands and worked with needle and thread. Spring light poured in from the street, fragments of silvery dust were buoyed upon it: I gazed around the little crowded room, at the photographs.
    “Miss Golightly,” I said. “What happened to the soldier?”
    She looked at me in surprise. I could see how her eyes strained to focus on me after staring at the needle point. She clicked her tongue, raised her eyebrows, laughed a little.
    “Death,” she said. She went back to her work. “That’s all. Just death.”
    I put the shorts back on. I stood before her. She touched my cheek.
    “How old now?” she asked.
    “Eleven.”
    We unwrapped sweets together and stood before the photographs.
    “My bonny boy,” she whispered.
    She sighed. She squeezed my arm. I felt how small beside me she had become.
    “You’ll be going off soon,” she said.
    She dreamt.
    “This is secret,” she whispered.
    She left me. I heard her footsteps on the stairs. She came back with a polished wooden box in her hands. She put it on the sideboard, lifted its lid with trembling hands, then took the jar out from inside and showed her baby to me.
    It was a fetus suspended in liquid. It was hardly longer than my thumb. There were buds of eyes and nose and mouth on its face, little half-formed hands raised to the chest, little knees raised to the belly. It rested upright with its spine gently arched as it curled in upon itself.
    “My little boy,” she whispered.
    She rested her palm upon the curve of the jar.
    “He would have been like you are.”
    We watched the baby in the liquid, the thin shaft of light falling upon him.
    “What’s he called?” I asked.
    “He would have been Anthony, like his father. But death happened in me too.”
    She put her arm across my shoulder. We were silent and we dreamt.
    “Do you see us in him?” she asked. “Me and my soldier?”
    Then Dad was knocking on the door. She put the jar back in the box. She kissed