Читать книгу Coming Home - Annabel Kantaria - Страница 13

‘What do you remember of that that day, Evie? Can you talk about it?’

I pulled my knitting out and picked up where I’d left off at home that morning. I was knitting my first scarf. There was a bit where I’d dropped a few stitches but I hoped it would be good enough to wear. On the playing fields outside, half of my class was playing football. I could see them through the staffroom window.

‘We were in the garden,’ I said. ‘Mum and me.’

Miss Dawson nodded.

‘I remember the sirens.’ I concentrated on the stitches falling away from my fingers; I tried not to think about the words tumbling out of my mouth. Somehow the ‘doing’ made the ‘saying’ easier.

It had been a beautiful day. The sky had been so blue I’d imagined it reaching all the way up into outer space. We’d heard the sirens while we’d been pulling weeds. I was wearing shorts and a vest and I’d been hot; sweat had been running into my eyes and I was wishing I’d worn a headband. Mum was throwing big clumps of weeds into a trug; I was copying her, pulling the bits that looked like grass and throwing them into my own small trug. I hadn’t dared to do the weeds that looked like flowers in case I got it wrong.

‘A song came on the radio and we danced,’ I told Miss Dawson. ‘It was “Dancing Queen”.’ Mum had jumped up and run to the kitchen windowsill, where we’d balanced the radio. She’d turned up the volume and started dancing, calling to me to join her.

Mum had been strutting up and down the patio, her hands on her hips, pointing and turning like a pop star. I’d dropped my trug and tried to copy her moves. Mum had sung along, pointing at me. I remember thinking how I couldn’t imagine being seventeen.

‘Mum was going to make lemonade later, and we were going to take a picnic to the park—maybe even hire a rowing boat.’

It was then, when I was thinking about ham sandwiches and lemonade, that we’d heard the sirens. When you hear them in the distance, you don’t think that it’s your brother dying on the road. You just don’t think that. ‘Sounds like something’s happened on the bypass,’ Mum had said.

‘We heard the sirens,’ I told Miss Dawson. ‘We didn’t know they were for Graham.’

‘Oh, Evie. No. Of course you couldn’t have known.’

I barely heard Miss Dawson. I was back in the moment, stitches sliding off my knitting needles as I remembered. Mum had turned up the radio to drown out the noise. The song had finished and, out of breath and laughing, we’d gone back to our trugs. ‘Out of breath’. How that haunted me now.

I looked at my knitting, my eyes blurring with tears. I’d heard people say that I probably couldn’t remember the day—that the shock would have blunted my memory—but it wasn’t like that at all. I remembered it too well. It was just hard to find the words.

‘We had some biscuits when we went back in.’ I stopped. Until I said it, it might not have happened. I took a deep breath. ‘After a while, there was a knock at the door. It was the police.’

I remembered how funny I’d thought it was that policemen were calling: we hadn’t been burgled. ‘Perhaps they heard about the lemonade!’ I’d joked to Mum but she’d shoved me into the sitting room and I’d crouched with my ear to the door. I hadn’t been able to hear much. I’d heard only bits.

‘Very sorry … pedestrian crossing … didn’t stop … thrown thirty feet … nothing they could do …’

Then I’d heard Mum. She was stern. ‘No, you’re wrong! It can’t be! Not Graham! You’ve made a mistake!’

I’d heard her shoes clomp hard across the hall, like she was running, and I’d got away from the door just as she’d shoved through it. ‘Evie!’ she’d called. ‘The police are saying Graham’s been run over! Obviously they’re wrong because he was with Daddy! I’m going to the hospital to sort it out.’

‘Mum went with them,’ I said to Miss Dawson. ‘She put on her lipstick and went.’ I jabbed my needles into the wool. ‘The police were right … they were right.’ My voice cracked and I took a breath then carried on, my eyes on my knitting. ‘Graham had been hit cycling across a pedestrian crossing. Dad had seen the whole thing. They put him in hospital, too; they had to knock him out.’ I stared at the window. ‘They should have kept Mum in, too.’ I turned to look at Miss Dawson. ‘I wouldn’t have minded. But they didn’t. Mum had to come home on her own and look after me.’