Read The Quiet Twin for Free Online Page B

Don’t you think?’
    Her eyes had fastened on him yet again, were serious, haunted, playful. He had not thought a child could have eyes such as these.
    ‘How old are you?’ he asked, shaking his head in wonder.
    ‘Nine,’ she answered. ‘Almost ten. Only thirty-eight days.’
    ‘You’re a very smart girl,’ he said, and she blushed with pleasure and skipped through the open doorway, her body crooked like a broken doll’s.
    She ran to a letter box, reached up and through the flap to search its contents, pulled out a bent envelope. Each step was a broken dance: was broken, but a dance nonetheless. He was aware that she was showing off for him, and he thought he saw in her smile that she was aware of it, too. She drew closer once again to where he stood on the threshold with the front door still in his hands.
    ‘Do you want to know who did it?’ she asked, and curled a finger towards him.
    Beer bent forward at the waist.
    ‘The dog?’ he asked, surprised. ‘You mean you know?’
    ‘Shine-a-man,’ she whispered very seriously, shaping the sounds like she was a little unsure of their pitch.
    ‘Shine-a-man?’ he asked.
    She nodded, raised a finger to each of her eyes and stretched the lids until they formed two narrow slits. ‘He plays the trumpet.’
    ‘Shine-a-man plays the trumpet.’
    ‘Maybe,’ she said, then turned away, as though no longer certain she should have parted with her secret.
    He looked past her into the gloom of the house.
    ‘Coming?’ she asked.
    ‘No, Anneliese. There is an errand I want to run.’
    ‘Goodbye then, Anton Beer.’
    ‘Yes, goodbye.’
    He watched after her as she ran into the courtyard and across to the back stairwell, the right leg longer than the left.
    It was only when she had disappeared from sight that he turned his back and headed for the tram stop up the road.

Chapter 6
    Smiling, crooked Anneliese Grotter said goodbye to the doctor and raced up to her rooms. The stairs gave her some difficulty, the steps were so high, and she was out of breath when she reached the apartment door and dug around her dress pockets to locate the key. Her father wasn’t back yet. He rarely came back before eight, and she had grown used to eating before he got home, then laying his dinner out for him on the kitchen table. She would sit with him and watch him eat: a humped little girl perched on the edge of the counter, her heels drumming against the door of the cupboard underneath. Sometimes, when he was in a good mood, he would tell her stories from work, of the day when the boss’s mother had come to visit and told her son off for yelling at the men, or about the fellow worker who’d drunk all the oil from a tin of Polish sardines and minutes later shat his pants. She would laugh then, and make sure he ate seconds. There were nights when he would hardly eat at all. There were nights when all the food was gone and all the money, and he sat cursing, running dirty hands through the locks of his hair.
    The girl climbed on a chair and surveyed the kitchen cupboards. There was still some cheese, a jar of pickled cucumbers, and a half-loaf of old bread that she could toast for him. They had no butter left, but the clay bowl was half full with pork lard that her father had brought back from work Monday last, and there were a quarter of a cabbage and some carrots for soup. Satisfied, she took out the lard and the bread and clambered down; made a sandwich for herself, ate it, then drank deeply from the tap.
    Her hunger sated, she looked under the sink to see how many bottles there were left. Her father got angry when they ran out, and it was her responsibility to look after supplies. She counted one bottle of schnapps, and five of beer; three fingers’ worth of Hungarian wine. It would do, but she’d have to run and buy some more tomorrow after school from the fat, smiling vendor across from the church. The money and ration coupons were in the drawer in the hallway commode. She fetched