Read Girl in Profile for Free Online Page B

great-grandmother asks, shocked and shaky.
    â€œOh, no. I just want to feel like me again for when I go back to work. I’m a project manager, you see.”
    I see. My heart is a submarine. When did I ever feel like me? I dunk my digestive, Dove appropriates the librarian’s mug even though it’s got the librarian’s name on it. There was a small power struggle for a couple of weeks which Dove eventually won. She usually does. She could bring a grown giant on stilts to his knees, that one. Gracie’s grandad gives me some ideas on crocuses. Sydney nearly chokes on a deseeded, deskinned grape. A guy comes in with a trolley full of books. He stares at me just to add to my paper clip of stares. I’m a magnet for them to be honest. He’s not bad looking. I imagine him taking me against the library wall – hard, fast, intense. Then I think of Drew lying on the mat in the children’s room so that he can comfort them easily when they wake from a nightmare. Guilt is eternal, not love. Dove and I choose a book about a girl with a magic paintbrush. Everything she paints becomes real. The keys to escape from jail, the horse to ride away on… Lucky fucker. We step out into the sunshine and I rally car myself for the journey home, which will involve many mysteries, distractions, detours…
    â€œListen to the birds, Mummy.” Dove tilts a pixie ear to catch the birdsong.
    How loud it is. Surprisingly loud. And persistent. Like the birds have had too much to drink and are getting shouty with each other. The young guy comes out of the library with an empty trolley and winks at me. So sure of himself. I flick my pixie crop – to match Dove’s pixie ears – gone long and smile.
    â€œWhat do you think they’re singing about?” I ask her.
    â€œAnything.” Like I’m an idiot. “They’re just happy.”
    How clever she is.

Elizabeth
    Pathos and Bathos
    Peter Pan sits on the wicker chair beside the window and reads to me. His profile against the ultramarine blue of the sea is pale and sharp as a cliff, and his hands hover like gulls about to swoop on a chip over the pages of Crickets of Great Britain and Ireland . He’ll read anything he can lay his hands on, anything those gulls can snaffle from the mobile library each week. It’s a substitute for eating. He gobbles syntax, devours the parts of speech, hoards metaphors under his pillow for when he gets the midnight munchies.
    â€œThe scaly cricket is wingless and therefore silent. They use their wings to sing, you see. Without wings there is no song.”
    I think of the wings I stitched laboriously for my daughter’s ballet classes, my son’s plays. The roots I dug, the wings I stitched so they might fly, so they might sing. Instead of me. Resentment swells up in me like a stale old fart. What did I do with my amazing beauty, my verve, my vitality? I gave them away to one husband, two children and a dog. And for what? The dog’s long gone to a land of sniffs and smells, husband’s raced off down the autobahn, and the children have flown so high and sung so loud they don’t deign to see me anymore, they don’t deign to hear me.
    â€œWe are merely groundhoppers. Eating liverwort.”
    I lobotomised my own life for them. Willingly. Eagerly even. That is the extraordinary thing. I wanted to do it. I stayed at home, kept my eyes on kinder and kirche , didn’t take my chances, passed the open windows, ignored the innuendoes from the men who might have.
    â€œWhen I was young…”
    â€œYou were never young, Peter. You were born immediately old like one of those peculiar lizards.”
    â€œWell, I was actually, as a matter of a fact. Once upon a time I was young, and when I was young I set more store by the apprehension of things than the things themselves. D’you know what I mean?”
    I think I do. Like the alternative life I lived in my head complete