Читать книгу The Pieces of You and Me - Rachel Burton, Rachel Burton - Страница 16

… A few days after we turned seven, my grandmother died.

At her funeral I cried big fat tears. I hated that I couldn’t stop them from falling in front of everyone. I hated that I couldn’t be stronger for my mum. You stood beside me in your school uniform, your jaw set stoically – a baby version of the way you set your jaw later whenever anyone disagreed with you.

You refused to go to school that morning, insisting on being at the funeral, on being with me even though your parents didn’t want you to. They told you that you were too young to go but you said you were twelve hours older than me and you came anyway. Halfway through the service, when I thought my tears would never stop and Dad had run out of tissues, I felt your hand slip into mine, hot and sticky and reminding me that you were there. Everything would always be all right as long as you were there. You may only have been twelve hours older than me but you always understood the world better than I ever did.

We were born twelve hours apart – you at 6 p.m. and me the following morning – in the same hospital, our mothers recovering in beds next to each other, an odd but lifelong friendship developing from that initial bond. You were early and I was late, which was the pattern that continued for the rest of our lives. You were always waiting for me to catch up with you.

Our parents’ houses stood back to back and our mothers’ friendship transferred to us. We grew up together, in one another’s pockets. We made a hole in the back fence so we could cut through into each other’s gardens instead of walking around the block to the front door. We wandered in and out of each other’s houses as though we owned the whole street. We did everything together from the moment we were born.

Our first day of school seemed less daunting because we had each other. We were always in trouble for talking, or for reading some book or other that we weren’t meant to be reading, both of us so ahead of the rest of the class even then. Sometimes, when they made us work in pairs, the teachers would separate us, make us work with other people. But you were always looking over your shoulder, making sure I was OK.

When you were six you punched the boy who used to bully me. You got in a lot of trouble for that. Afterwards you told me you were going to marry me one day, and always look after me. You were the only six-year-old I’ve ever known who tried to stick to that promise.

The autumn after my grandmother died we were sent off to separate schools, hothousing us in single-sex environments, prepping us for the ‘great things’ our parents had planned for our futures. I missed you desperately. I was so used to you then that I missed the testosterone in my every day, even if I wasn’t really aware that’s what it was that I was missing. Every evening when we got home we ripped off our expensive school uniforms and pulled on the dirty, scruffy clothes we preferred wearing to sit in my mother’s apple orchard, catching up on our days, daydreaming.

And then, when we were eleven, the unthinkable happened.

They took you away from me …