Read Holes for Faces for Free Online

stare that settles on me, Bertie says “Dinner won’t be long.”
    It sounds so much like a rebuke, and is backed up by so many trespassing smells, that I retort “I could have made it, you know.”
    “Could you?” Before I can rise to this challenge he adds “Don’t you appreciate my cuisine and Paula’s?”
    “Your children don’t seem to all that much,” I’m provoked to respond and quote a favourite saying of Jo’s. “It isn’t seaside without fish and chips.”
    “I’m afraid we believe in raising them more healthily.”
    “Do you, Paula? In other words, not how your mother and I treated you?” When she only gazes sadly at me from the kitchen I say “It can’t be very healthy if they hardly touch their food.”
    “It isn’t very healthy for them to hear this kind of thing.”
    “Find something to watch for a few minutes,” her husband tells them. “Maybe your grandfather can choose something suitable.”
    I feel silenced and dismissed. I follow the children into the lounge and insist on selecting the wildlife show. “I’ve got to watch as well,” I say, even if it sounds like acknowledging a punishment. They greet the announcement of dinner without concealing their relief, although their enthusiasm falls short of the meal itself. When at last they’ve finished sprinkling cheese on their spaghetti they eat just the sauce, and hardly a leaf of their salad. Though I perform relishing all of mine, I have a sense of being held responsible for their abstinence. I try not to glance at the mirror of the dresser, but whenever I fail there appear to be only the reflections of the family and me.
    Once the twins have filled up with chocolate dessert, it’s time for games. I vote against reviving the one in which the pallid head pops up, which means that Gerald vetoes his sister’s choice of Monopoly. Eventually I remember the games stored in the cupboard under the stairs. The dark shape that rears up beyond the door is my shadow. As I take Snakes and Ladders off the pile I’m reminded of playing it with Paula and her mother, who would smile whenever Paula clapped her hands at having climbed a ladder. I’ve brought the game into the dining-room before I recall playing it with Beryl.
    Was it our last game with her? It feels as if it should have been. Every time she cast a losing throw she moved one space ahead of it. “Can’t get me,” she would taunt the snakes. “You stay away from me, nasty squirmy things.” I thought she was forbidding them to gobble her up as if she were one of her snacks between meals, the powdered sponge cakes that she’d grown more and more to resemble. Whenever she avoided a snake by expanding a move she peered at me out of the concealment of her puffed-up face. I felt challenged to react, and eventually I stopped my counter short of a snake. “Can’t he count?” my aunt cried at once. “Go in the next box.”
    Once I’d descended the snake I complained “Auntie Beryl keeps going where she shouldn’t.”
    “Don’t you dare say I can’t count. They knew how to teach us when I was at school.” This was the start of a diatribe that left her panting and clutching her chest while her face tried on a range of shades of grey. “Look what you’ve done,” my father muttered in my ear while my mother tried to calm her down. When Beryl recaptured her wheezing breath she insisted on finishing the game, staring hard at me every time she was forced to land on a snake. She lost, and glared at me as she said “Better never do anything wrong, even the tiniest thing. You don’t know who’ll be watching.”
    Of course I knew or feared I did. I wish I’d chosen another game to play with Paula and her family. Before long Gerald pretends one of his throws hasn’t landed on a snake. “Fair play, now,” I exhort, earning a scowl from Gerald and a look from his father that manages to be both disapproving and blank. Perhaps Geraldine misinterprets my comment, because soon she