Read The Woman Who Stole My Life for Free Online

suddenly I need sandals and floaty pastel garments.
    Mum, a short, roundy creature, has always felt the cold but even she’s going about without her cardigan.
    ‘So what’s happening here?’ I ask.
    I can hear a whirring noise, then Karen’s eldest child, Clark, bursts past Mum and yells at me, ‘They got a stairlift! For Grandad’s bad back!’
    I can see now. A contraption has been fitted to the wall by the stairs and Karen is strapping herself into a seat with three-year-old Mathilde on her lap. Then she lifts a lever and the pair of them start their whirry ascent. A very slow whirry ascent. They wave at Mum, Clark and me and we wave back and the mood is celebratory.
    Mum lowers her voice. ‘He says he won’t use it. Go in and sweet-talk him.’
    I stand at the sitting-room door and stick my head into the tiny room. As always, Dad is sitting in his armchair, with a library book open on his lap. He radiates grumpiness, then he sees that it’s me and he becomes a little more cheery. ‘Ah, Stella, it’s you.’
    ‘Are you coming for a go on the stairlift?’
    ‘I’m not.’
    ‘Ah, Dad.’
    ‘Ah, Dad, my eye. I can climb the stairs on my own. I told her not to get it. I’m grand, and we haven’t the money.’
    He summons me closer. ‘Fear of death, that’s her problem. She thinks if she buys yokes like that, they’ll keep us alive. But when your number’s up, it’s up.’
    ‘You’ve another thirty years in you,’ I say, staunchly. Because he might have. He’s only seventy-two and people are living to be ancient. But not necessarily people like my parents.
    From the age of sixteen Dad did a physical job, loading and unloading crates, in Ferrytown docks. That wrecks a person, much more than sitting at a desk does. He was twenty-twothe first time a disc slipped in his back. He spent a long time – I don’t know, maybe eight weeks – immobile in his bed, on strong painkillers. Then he returned to work and eventually banjaxed himself again. He got injured countless times – it seemed to be a feature of my childhood that Dad was ‘sick again’, something that rolled around as regularly as Hallowe’en and Easter – but he was a fighter and he kept on working until he couldn’t any longer. At the age of fifty-four, they’d broken him beyond repair and that was the end of his working life. And his money-earning life.
    These days, the docks have machines to do the unloading, which would have saved Dad’s back but would probably have meant he didn’t have a job at all.
    ‘Please, Dad, do it for me. I’m your favourite child.’
    ‘I’ve only got the two. C’mere …’ He indicates the book on his lap. ‘Nabokov.
The Original of Laura
, it’s called. I’ll give it to you when I’m finished.’
    ‘Stop trying to change the subject.’ And please don’t make me read it.
    It’s a curse being Dad’s ‘clever’ child. He reads books the way other people take cold showers – they’re good for you, but you’re not expected to enjoy them. And he’s passed that way of thinking on to me: if I have fun with a book, I feel I’ve wasted my time.
    Dad’s as thick as thieves with Joan, a woman who works in the local library and who seems to have adopted Dad as her project – no author is too obscure, no text too unreadable.
    ‘It’s his final novel,’ Dad says. ‘He told his wife to burn it but she didn’t. Think of what a loss to literature that would have been. Mind you, he’s a right dirty article …’
    ‘Let’s go on the stairlift.’ I’m keen to stop talking about Nabokov.
    Slowly Dad gets to his feet. He’s a small man, short and sinewy. I offer him my arm and he slaps it away.
    Out in the hall, Karen has returned to ground level and I study her clothes and hair with interest – in our unadorned states we look very similar so if I copy what she does, I can’t go wrong. She seems to be managing this warm-weather-transition thing with ease. Black skinny jeans with zips at