Читать книгу When Fenelon Falls - Dorothy Ellen Palmer - Страница 16

She’s such a liar. She’s done it all her life, just for the attention. Needs to get everyone around her cooing, ‘Oh Hazel, you poor hard-done-by-brave little thing!’ Well, this time she’s gone too far. If I have to pick between my sister and my Kevin, it’s no contest. When that lying smut came out of her mouth, I reached for my rifle, said I’d be out hunting rabbit. Said by the time I got back, she’d better have a better story and she’d better have made Mumsie believe it. Because I knew. Spat it right in her face, said I knew how she really paid for that fancy-dancy apartment in the city. Said if she didn’t know which ‘fancy man’ it was that had got her in the family way, if she didn’t even know his name, well, that was just too damn bad! She could flip the bloody phonebook, for all I cared. My rifle pointed itself in her direction. ‘But if you ever say anything so filthy about my Kevin again, I’ll be hunting you.’ She didn’t even look up. She hunched on the parlour couch, hand at her throat, clutching her version of the matching lockets Daddy gave us. She was still there when I came in, jabbing a needle into the ripped seam of an old doll’s dress. Eyes blank as a cow, mending yellow silk with red cotton. Like there was nothing wrong with that. Like nothing had happened, certainly nothing that could make one sister hate another. Every rabbit I shot at looked like her belly.