Читать книгу Jenny Valentine - 4 Book Award-winning Collection - Jenny Valentine - Страница 26

It was at least a week before I bothered to listen to the tape.

I didn’t give a damn about Violet Park.

I got out of the car at the dump when Mum got back in and I made sure she got a good look at the watch while I did it. Then she drove off and I sat down with Dad’s stuff and just watched it. Bits of paper were already starting to lift out of boxes and flutter about and become not his any more. I worried that if I didn’t watch they would just become trash like all the stuff around them and I wasn’t ready for that to happen. I thought about how Dad’s things stood out to me, how precious they were against the other stuff my brain was telling me was junk. And then I thought about all the junk and how that was precious to somebody else, and soon the whole dump became this mountain range of neglected and forgotten treasure that I had to watch like a hawk.

Somebody had to.

After a while, the men who thought I was an idiot came out of the office and said they were closing up. It was three-thirty. I know that because I looked at my dad’s watch. His sunglasses were right next to me, shoved down the side of a box of books. I put them on before I left.

I went to Martha’s.

I’m sure the last thing you need when you’ve been going out with someone for three weeks is them showing up on your doorstep like their life’s ended, but I didn’t think about that at the time.

She opened the door and I just started crying. I couldn’t help it. Martha didn’t say anything. She put her arms out and I sort of walked into them, and she took me upstairs to her tiny bedroom and she didn’t ask me one question, just sat with me and held my hand and got me a drink of water and waited until I’d stopped blubbing like a fool.

Then she said that stuff was just stuff and that when her mum died she could throw out every single thing that had ever belonged to her and it still wouldn’t change the bits of Wendy that she was going to hold on to forever, like the time she taught her how to ride a bike, or bought her first bra, or read to her every night even when she was too old for it.

I said I didn’t remember my dad ever reading to me and it was mum who taught me how to ride a bike and I didn’t wear bras.

Martha said maybe I was clinging on to all dad’s stuff because I didn’t have enough good memories of him to fill the spaces.

It was a good point.