Read Tree of Hands for Free Online Page B

Tanya home for the weekend and Four Winds didn’t like it if you sent the kids back with a lot of dirty washing.
    Those two big children – he had thought they were her brother and sister. He had thought her the same age as himself or younger. It wasn’t possible she was twenty-eight. Maureen said Carol had a face like a doll and in a way that was true, but dolls were made that way, to look like beautiful children, that was the idea, wasn’t it? Carol’s face was round and her upper lip very short, her skin pink and white china and her hair the kind of golden curls that cluster baby-like over forehead and temples, ring curls, coin curls, damp-looking like a child’s. And her sea-blue eyes had met his and she had smiled.
    He fell in love with her, he often thought afterwards, even before she spoke. When she did speak, it was to see if he had any change for her second machine. He hadn’t – who ever has enough in a laundrette? But he told her where change was to be come by.
    â€˜Get your sister to go next door but one to the paper shop. They’ve always got change.’
    She looked at him sideways, charmingly. She lowered her long dark curling lashes.
    â€˜Flattery could get you a long way, d’you know that?’
    He hadn’t known what she meant, and when sheexplained, he couldn’t believe it. It was hard for him to believe his luck too, that he had met Carol and she liked him. Two days later he was in her house and he was asking who the man in the photograph was and she was saying: ‘You’re the same type really. I always say that’s
my
type.’
    Rolling up the clean sheets, stuffing them back into the bag, he set off home to wait for her. After six months he still got exciting thinking about her coming home, waiting for the sound of her key in the lock. Still? It was stronger now than it had been at first. Best of all, he liked coming home at night over the Chinese bridge – on whose wooden parapet he had joined the other graffitists and printed in aerosol paint:
Barry loves Carol
– and counting the houses and seeing the lights in the eighth one and knowing she was there, longing for him as he was longing for her.
    Just before eleven-thirty he thought he heard a car outside but he must have been mistaken because Carol never had a taxi or a mini-cab, they couldn’t afford it. It was coincidence, that was all, that a minute or two after he heard the car Carol’s key turned in the lock. He had been watching television and he turned it off as she came in.
    She had had quite a bit to drink. Who wouldn’t have, working six hours in a wine bar? It was only human nature. Her cheeks were flushed pink and her greeny-blue eyes very bright. She came a little way into the room and took an extravagant pose, lifting up her arms, turning slowly round to twirl the skirts of the black and white zig-zag striped dress above her red boots.
    â€˜That’s new,’ said Barry. ‘Where did you get that?’
    Carol began to laugh. ‘Nicked it. How about that?’ She pulled him into the armchair and sat on his knee. ‘Mrs Fylemon went out to have lunch with her mum so I whipped round quick with the Hoover and got done by two and then I got on the bus and went down Shopper’s Heaven. There’s this new boutique I’ve had my eye on. They only let you take two things in the changing room with you. The girl said how many had I got there and Isaid two though I’d got three. I’d put a black one on the hanger over this one. I put this one on and my jumper and skirt over it and I didn’t hang about. I took the other two back and said they were too big and just sailed out though I was laughing inside fit to kill myself.’
    â€˜That was clever,’ said Barry admiringly. ‘I wouldn’t like you to get caught, love.’
    Carol stroked his hair, and rubbed his nose with her nose. ‘I won’t get caught.