Read Me and You for Free Online Page B

stuck to the bed. My throat had closed over and I was struggling to breathe.
    In an unexpected move, like I was freeing myself of a spider’s web, I flung myself off the bed, banging my left knee on the corner of the bedside table. Gritting my teeth and swallowing a
scream of pain, I limped towards the space between the cupboard and the wall. Grazing my legs, I slipped under a table, where rolls of rugs were piled up. I stretched out on top of them as the
blood pulsed in my eardrums.
    They wouldn’t be able to unlock the door. The lock was old and if you pushed the key the whole way in, it wouldn’t turn.
    Then the door flew open.
    I bit down on a smelly rug.
    I could only see a slice of the floor from where I was. I heard footsteps and then a pair of jeans and black cowboy boots appeared.
    Nihal didn’t own a pair of boots. My father wore Church brogues, and moccasins in summer. My mother had lots of pairs, but none of them were that scruffy. And the Silver Monkey only had
old, worn-out trainers. Who could it be?
    Whoever it was would notice that the cellar was being lived in. It was all there. The bed, the food, the television turned on.
    Meanwhile the black boots were wandering around the room like they were looking for something. They moved towards my bed and stopped.
    The boots’ owner was breathing through their mouth, like they had a cold. They lifted up a tin from the table and put it back down again. ‘Is anyone there?’ A woman’s
voice.
    I crushed the rug between my teeth. If she doesn’t find me, I said to myself, I will go and visit my cousin Vittorio, who loves playing board games, every single day. I swear to God
I’ll be his best friend.
    ‘Who’s in here?’
    I closed my eyes and put my hands over my ears but I could still hear her walking, moving, looking.
    ‘Come out from under there. I can see you.’
    I opened my eyes again. A shadowy figure was sitting on my bed.
    ‘Move it.’
    No, I would never move, not on my life.
    ‘Are you deaf? Come out from under there.’
    Maybe it was best to know who it was. I pulled myself up and, like a dog that has been caught with his nose in the fridge, I slid out.
    Olivia was sitting on my bed.
    She’d lost a lot of weight and her square cheekbones stuck out. Her face looked stretched and tired and her long blonde hair had been cut short. Above her jeans she was wearing a faded
T-shirt with the Camel cigarettes logo and a blue sailor’s jacket.
    She wasn’t as beautiful as she had been two years ago.
    She studied me, perplexed. ‘What are you doing here?’
    If there was something I hated, it was being seen in my pants and in particular being seen by women. Embarrassed, I picked up my trousers and slipped them on.
    ‘Why are you hiding down here?’
    I didn’t know what to say. I was so confused I could barely shrug my shoulders.
    My stepsister got up and looked around. ‘Forget about it, I don’t care. I’m looking for a box that I gave to my . . . to our father. The servant, upstairs, told me that it
should be down here. He couldn’t come down with me because he was ironing. Was he being an idiot?’
    Nihal was actually a bit of an idiot with people he didn’t know well. He had this bad habit of looking down his nose at everyone.
    ‘It’s a big box, with OLIVIA written on it. Give me a hand looking for it.’
    I felt so happy that my stepsister didn’t care what I was doing in there that I really did help her to look for it.
    But there was no sign of the box, or rather, there were heaps of boxes but none had OLIVIA written on them.
    My stepsister shook her head. ‘See how little your father cares about my stuff?’
    I whispered, ‘He’s your father too.’
    ‘You’re ri—’ Olivia squeezed her hand into a victory fist. Sitting beneath a cabinet, just behind the cellar door, was a box covered in sellotape, with OLIVIA’S
HOUSE FRAGILE written on it.
    ‘Here it is. Look where he put it. Give me a hand, it’s heavy.’
    We