Читать книгу Sarah Lean - 3 Book Collection - Sarah Lean, Sarah Lean - Страница 15

AT SEVEN O’CLOCK ON TUESDAY MORNING I LAY in bed thinking about my mum and the giant silver dog. In my daydream I said, “Mum, where are you?”

And she said, Hello, Cally, I’m right here.

And I said, “Where?”

And she said, About an inch away.

I felt her nearness, but I couldn’t see her. I opened my eyes.

I watched the dust fairies trapped in a stream of sunlight between the curtains. Little pieces of almost nothing that disappeared when the sun went in. Slowly and silently they turned, undecided about which way to go. They coasted and floated. I whispered to them because they were small and fragile. “Make up your mind,” I said. Then I blew on them and soon they were whirling away.

Dad came in. Same old checked shirt with the ink stain on the pocket, same old crumpled work trousers. Same old messy hair and beard, dark and speckled with grey, like he’d been out overnight in a frost.

“You awake?” he said.

He picked my school clothes off the floor and put them on the end of my bed. He stood there a minute.

“You’ve got that charity thing today, haven’t you?”

“Sponsored silence,” I said.

It was nice that he remembered. He was so forgetful these days. He forgot he had to do the ironing. He forgot to shave. He forgot to pay the phone bill and it took weeks for them to connect us up again. He was just like a raggedy old bear still sleepy from hibernating over winter. Except winter was ages ago.

He used to be a different sort of Dad, always joking about with Luke, rough and tumbling on the sofa. He always helped me with maths homework, straight after tea. He’d show me how to do a question, then he’d do a bit and I’d finish it, until I could do it by myself. You could sit on his lap and he’d listen to you tell him anything.

I climbed out from under the bedcovers and stood up on the bed so I was as tall as him. I held his face in my hands, like he used to do to me. I wanted to say something about Mum, to say remember when … remember? Like I’d already asked a thousand times. I searched his eyes, looked to see if Mum was in there. But it was like the morning after there’s been heaps of snow and you can’t tell what’s underneath any more.

So I said, “Dad? What if I can’t help it and I say something?”

He squeezed me. “I won’t mind. You’ll be doing your best.”

He went off in a dream, opened the curtains, sent the dust fairies into the shadows.

So that was it. My best didn’t sound like much. He was just the same as all the others who didn’t think I could do it.

“I’ll mind,” I whispered to the invisible spinning dust. And those were my final words.