Читать книгу He Is Mine and I Have No Other - Rebecca O'Connor - Страница 10

Dad dropped me at the bottom of the laneway up to school that morning. Usually he’d drop me right outside the front door but we were running late. I’d spent ages in the bathroom staring into my eyes, the size of my pupils: they were that dilated the blue of the iris was almost invisible.

There were dozens of girls pouring out of school buses, smoking inside the front gates, their shoes scuffed white, skirts rolled up round their thighs. There were boys on the buses too, which made the skin on my face and neck taut and hot, even though I knew for sure there were none of them I’d like. They were all smaller than me, for one thing. And they smelled, most of those boys. They smelled like they had dirty things on their minds.

I went round where the cars were meant to go, rather than the path at the side, and slipped crossing the cattle grid, grazing the palms of my hands on the pebbledash of the gate pillar. My whole body burned with embarrassment. I wanted to scramble through the ditch and run through as many icy fields as it would take for me to feel cold and in control again – dozens of icy fields, so that I could feel the wet soaking into my wool tights. But I just squeezed the strap of my school bag with both hands, digging my nails into my palms, and walked as fast as I could without looking, like I wanted to disappear. It wasn’t that I was worried what they thought of me, but that they would see me at all, look at me, watch me. That’s what I hated more than anything.

On up past the rhododendrons, covered in a mint frost, past the woods on the right, past the nuns’ plot of vegetables, the gardener spreading pot-ash. I could feel the cold trickling down my neck and down my spine. Past the statue of the Virgin Mary and child. The redness fading from my cheeks. Sister Rosario off in the distance. Only her legs, in their skin-coloured nylons, seemed to be moving. The rest of her covered in a dark grey habit the colour of her eyes. Her tiny hands folded under the heavy sleeves. She nodded and smiled at me, and I felt better for seeing her.

I said, ‘Hello, Sister,’ in a voice that wasn’t really my own.