Read Our Endless Numbered Days: A Novel for Free Online

holiday willy-nilly, you know. You’re in a lot of hot water, young lady.”
    She told me to sit on one of the comfortable chairs outside the headmaster’s office. The fabric showed the tears and stains of years of pupil and teacher distress. Through the frosted glass door, I caught a glimpse of the headmaster sipping at his teacup, making me wait until called for.
    “I understand from Mr. Harding that you’ve been absent for two weeks, without your mother informing the school,” said the headmaster after he’d called me in.
    “She died,” I said, without a plan.
    “Your mother?” said the headmaster. His eyebrows rose and plunged madly, and he managed to look both desperate and surprised. He pressed a button on his desk, which set off a buzzer in the office across the hall.
    “She was killed in a car accident in Germany,” I told them both when Mrs. Cass had responded to the headmaster’s summons.
    “Oh my gooodness,” Mrs. Cass said, her hand going to her mouth. “Not Ute. Oh no, not Ute.” She looked around and behind her as if she wanted to sit down, but became distracted and instead said, “You poor, poor child.” She clasped me to her, pressing me into her soft bosom, then took me back to the chair and brought me thick, sweet tea in a cup with a saucer, as if it were me who had just learned of the car crash and not her.
    Through the door, the headmaster said, “Surely we would have heard. Isn’t she that famous piano player?”
    Mrs. Cass’s answer was too quiet to hear but it involved a lot of gasps, head shaking, and hand clasping.
    When I had finished the tea, she guided me back to my classroom, her hand on my shoulder, both caressing and propelling me forward. She took Mr. Harding aside and had a whispered exchange with him; his expression moved from boredom to shock to a crinkled face of sympathy when he glanced at me, waiting at the front of the class.
    On the first row, Becky mouthed, “What did you say?” and I tried to mouth back, “I told them she died in a car crash,” but the words “car crash” were too difficult to communicate without saying them out loud. Rose Chapman nudged and leaned toward Becky, who, in a hiss, translated my words into “Tabitha died in a rush!” The whisper spread from group to group, where children gathered around marbles, counters, and dice. Mr. Harding told me I was excused; I packed up KerPlunk and left.
    At home, I saw little of my father and Oliver. Once, they went down to the high street and brought back fish and chips, which they laid out on plates and ate with knives and forks at the dining-room table. Oliver got out the cutlery with the ivory handles and selected Ute’scrystal Spiegelau goblets from the sideboard for the red wine they had bought at the off-licence.
    “Prost! Toast! Der Bundespost!” shouted my father, and both men laughed in a slurred way while the crystal chinked. I carried my dinner, still wrapped in newspaper, into the sitting room and ate it in front of the telly. I went up to bed soon after. I lay still with my eyes shut, but sleep didn’t come and I worried I had forgotten how to do it. I hummed the theme music to The Railway Children and imagined that Ute was downstairs, conquering the piano, while at the kitchen table my father was flicking through the newspaper. Everything and everyone were where they were supposed to be. But I was still awake when my father and Oliver stumbled upstairs, calling goodnight to each other.
    If the two men weren’t laughing, they were arguing. With all the windows in the house open to try to let in a breeze, I heard their shouting no matter which room they were in. They sounded like a Retreater meeting for two—the real ones had been suspended for the summer; apparently even survivalists took holidays. I tried to ignore them, but would find myself straining to make out each word. My father shouted the loudest, lost control first; Oliver’s voice remained a steady measured drawl that