Read Cry of a Seagull for Free Online

against her family. Some of the thoughts were all too familiar: ‘No one understands me.’ ‘Everything I do is wrong, so why bother?’
    Everyone had those occasionally, and Rose and Abigail had decided that if you didn’t, there was something abnormal about you. But you didn’t live permanently with all those ‘Nobody understands me’ thoughts. They came and went.
    But Joanne seemed to be abnormal the other way. Her thoughts of hate were black and brooding. They were not just a reaction to something said or done. They were with her all the time, like sick background music acompanying her everywhere, and the worst part was that behind the dirge was something even worse: ‘I hate myself.’
    â€˜Take that pullover off, Joanne, and get your fat body into the sea.’
    â€˜
You
should talk.’
    Joanne’s mother was standing in all the stout glory of a violently flowered swimsuit, out of which bits of her poked and bulged. ‘Come on, dear.’ She pulled her husband to his feet. He was as skinny as she was fat, with a hollow, hairless chest and swimming trunks that were too big for him. Whata pair. Joanne sat hunched in the pullover that was boiling hot, but couldn’t take it off.
    â€˜Come
on
, Joanne, I said.’
    â€˜Not now.’
    â€˜Don’t want to use the same bathwater as us?
Derek
!’ Waddling into the sea like a flowered pig, the mother turned and sent back a commanding shriek that echoed off the cliff and sent a large bird flapping out to sea.
    â€˜Bleep-bleep.’ The child did not look up from where he lay on his stomach.
    â€˜No use expecting
him
to do anything as healthy as swimming.’ The father stood with his bony white ankles in the water, thin arms wrapped round him, shivering. ‘Next year, let’s go to the Costa del Sol.’ (Some hope, Joanne thought to herself.) ‘Then I dare say he’ll want to spend all his time in the casino.’
    â€˜Why doesn’t he make a sandcastle?’ The grandmother swung her toad face round to Derek and munched her toothless jaws. ‘Here I’ve bought him a lovely bucket and spade and he’s never touched it. And me a pensioner. I should have saved my money.’
    â€˜And your breath.’ Joanne spun the spade over to her across the small patch of pebbly sand between the rocks. ‘Dig a grave and climb into it.’
    Even Rose, who was always being told off for cheek, was shocked by that. Her own grandmother, her father’s mother, would have strode across the beach and clouted her. But in this family nobody turned a hair. The grandmother put half a Mars bar into her mouth and went to sleep. Joanne threw the red plastic bucket up among the rubbish at the foot of the cliffs. She wished she could really shock them, and wake them out of their awfulness. Pity she didn’t know that she had shocked Rose, at least.
    When the parents came back from their swim and were eating buns and drinking beer, Joanne wandered down to the sea and sat on a rock and pretended to be a mermaid. She stretched out her legs, ankles crossed close together, and shook back her long hair, but she didn’t feel seductive, even if there had been any sailors out at sea.
    She stared unhappily at the endless expanse of ocean. To Rose’s horror, the thought came into Joanne’s head that she would walk far out into the water, and see if anybody cared. She would keep on walking into the sea, which was grey and featureless like her soul, a blank nothing. Even the boats had the sense to stay away from it. There was nothing between Joanne and the horizon but a large buoy with a black and white marker flag, and a grey gull that swerved, dropped, and landed on the buoy for a moment before he spread his powerful wings and went on out towards the horizon. All right for
him
. He was lightness and freedom. Joanne was lead.
    â€˜Joanne – Joanne! What’s the matter, are