Читать книгу A HORSE FOR ANGEL - Sarah Lean, Sarah Lean - Страница 8

UR LOFT WAS AS SILENT AS THE MOON. EXCEPT for my footsteps, which sounded hollow against the boards. The yellow padding in the sloping walls blocked out the sounds of the world. It felt like a place from long ago that had stopped, with its old air and old things we keep because they don’t belong at the dump or in a charity shop or anywhere else but with us.

I saw the grey suitcase. And I could have just grabbed it and gone straight back downstairs. Instead, I pushed my shoulders back and turned my chin up. I was going to make a stand. And I didn’t mind being up there where the world had paused and nobody could see me or hear me. Just a few minutes of pretending…

I imagined telling Mum what I really thought.

Now listen, Mother, I don’t want to go to any stupid clubs. You see, I don’t like them and I don’t really have any friends at them because I’m not very good at anything and I’m not interested either. Now you want to dump me in a place where I don’t know anyone and I’ll have to do a whole load more things that I don’t care about. And I know how much it upset you and reminded you of Dad, even though you didn’t say… but I did actually want to fix those lights. And I really liked doing it.

I didn’t mean to think that last bit. And I knew I’d never be brave enough to say any of those things.

I sat down in the old dust and sighed. That’s when I noticed the tidy pile of cardboard boxes that I was sitting next to. I decided to open the top one.

Inside there was an old Mother’s Day card with crushed tissue flowers on the front, a lined notebook with big uncertain handwriting and pages and pages of scratchy drawings of a house with five-legged animals in it. At the bottom of the box were clumpy clay models and strange mixed-up creatures made from cardboard, wires, feathers and buttons. An elephant-giraffe with a long neck and a trunk, a hippo-bird with two clawed legs, and other impossible animals. It’s funny how you can’t remember making these things, even though you must be the same person with the same hands.

I noticed then that the cardboard box had a sticker on it. It said Nell – aged four. All the boxes had stickers saying my name and my age! Year by year, everything I’d made had been stored in a pile, getting taller every year. I looked inside some more of them. All the other boxes had schoolbooks and reports in them. How come I didn’t make things any more?

That’s when I saw a brown leather case behind the boxes, lying alone in the shadows under the eaves, under forgotten dust. It was a bit bigger than my school backpack and quite heavy. I heard things shifting inside as I dragged it over by the handle. The leather was worn, the seams grazed, like skin protecting the tender things inside.

There was no sticker on it with my name, but I flicked the catches open anyway.

Inside was like an ancient tomb, full of flat pieces of metal with holes round the edges, narrow strips like silver bones, scattered among ornaments and precious objects. I rummaged through the pieces and found a musical box and sixteen miniature painted horses. I liked the way one fitted in my hand with my fingers under its metal belly and its neck against my thumb. Its galloping legs were frozen in time, its silent eyes wide open. And then I remembered what it was.

Once, all the pieces had made a mechanical carousel, almost as big as our coffee table, but taller. I was four when I last saw the brilliance of it, when I last saw the lights and spinning horses. I opened the lined notebook again, the one from when I was four. That’s what the pictures were! Not strange creatures with five legs, but horses with long tails, and they weren’t in a house, they were on a carousel. And then I remembered the buzzing in my skin and brain, the laugh alive in my tummy, as I had crouched and gazed at the swirling, whirling carousel.

I held the strings of tiny lights. I could see the filaments inside, as fine as baby hair. I arranged the horses in a circle. I poked the wires from the lights into a black battery cylinder. My hands remembered what to do. The lights burned, white and gold and pink. I turned the handle on the musical box, heard the rusty chimes speed up and come to life. All the fragments lay around me, all the pieces. But I thought the horses kicked; I thought they were spinning beside me, as if they were alive.

“Nell? Can’t you find it?” Mum called. “Do you need me to come up and look?”

I scrambled to scoop all the pieces back up, to hide them away again.

“No! Don’t come up!” I said quickly as I snapped the case shut. “I’ve found it.”

Then I wondered what would be in a box called Nell – aged eleven. And I remembered why I didn’t make things any more.