Read The Children's Bach for Free Online

Vicki, standing before the mirror, saw herself to be not yet an adult sexual being. She staggered to the fire escape in the towering heels, pushed open the door, and walked straight into the tree. Its fingery leaves flicked her across the open eye and she cried out and crouched with her hands over her face, blinded with shock and gushes of chemical tears. A voice she did not recognise as her own choked and groaned. She crawled back inside in the stupid shoes and curled up on the bed, weeping with self-pity and foolishness. She wanted to tell Athena.
    The back door was open. She tiptoed down the passage. Athena was lying under a blanket on the big bed with her back to the door.
    â€˜Are you sick?’ said Vicki.
    â€˜No,’ said Athena. ‘Just having a read before the kids get home.’
    â€˜Don’t get up,’ said Vicki. ‘I’ll sit at the desk and draw or something.’
    The scratching of the lead pencil put Athena to sleep. She half-woke once or twice, when the phone rang and Vicki scampered down the hall to answer it, and when music came floating from the kitchen radio and plates rattled dully in water. Good grief, thought Athena, she’s washing up.
    Athena’s life was mysterious to Vicki. She seemed contained, without needs, never restless.
    â€˜I’m bored,’ said Vicki. ‘Un-bore me, Thena!’
    Athena laughed. ‘I don’t even know what boredom is.’
    But how could she not know? thought Vicki, watching jealously out the front window the arrival of Athena’s friend to visit with her two children: the slow ritual of getting out of the car, the back door held open against the hip, the unstrapping of small bodies, the unloading of the blue plastic nappy bag, the toys, the pencils, the Viking helmet, the Maya temple colouring book; the endless patience with the whining, twining children; the slow talking about nothing in particular; the friend gasbagging about health and sickness while Athena stood ironing at the board, keeping her head half-turned to show that she was still listening.
    â€˜The woman next door,’ said the friend, ‘went and had colonic irrigations. And the lady who did them found stuff inside her that she’d eaten ten years ago!’
    â€˜How could she tell?’ said Athena.
    â€˜ Anyway ,’ said the friend, ‘she rang up and told me he’d gone off with some child , a girl of eighteen. So I said to her, “Get some interesting knitting. Something with a complicated pattern. And stay home and just sit it out .’’ And that’s what she did.’
    They were talking like this when Vicki left to have her hair cut, and they were still talking like this when she got back, the only difference being that the table was now covered in dirty cups and cake crumbs.
    â€˜Look!’ cried Vicki. ‘Now I feel terrific . Is that red mark on the back of my neck still there? Do you know what that is? She cut the squared-off bit at the back with those shears.’
    â€˜Clippers?’ said the friend.
    â€˜Yes! Clippety clip! And once she was going clippety clip right into my skin!’ She gave a high, excited laugh.
    The two mothers looked at her with their calm smiles. She felt as jerky as a puppet.
    â€˜Last time I had my hair cut short back home,’ Vicki chattered on, rushing to the round mirror in the corner, ‘I looked so ugly that I cried all night. And when I woke up in the morning my eyes were so swollen that I looked like a cane toad!’
    â€˜You certainly don’t look ugly now,’ said the friend, in her slow drawl.
    â€˜I know!’ said Vicki. ‘I’m so elegant now that I ought to be lined up and shot !’
    The friend laughed, but Athena heard Vicki trying for Elizabeth’s smart tone, and it squeezed her heart.
    Vicki began to hang round the Foxes’ house in Bunker Street earlier each day. They heard her old pushbike crash against the rubbish