Читать книгу Sarah Lean - 3 Book Collection - Sarah Lean, Sarah Lean - Страница 30

DAD WAS LYING ON THE SOFA WATCHING TV, his shirt untucked, a bottle of beer in his hand.

“We can’t have a dog here,” he said. He sat up, put the bottle down and pressed the mute button.

“We can’t afford it. You’d want it to have a good home, wouldn’t you?”

There was no point in trying to persuade him. No point in speaking to him at all. I folded my arms and watched a woman crying and shouting silently on the screen. A policeman was shouting back. Both of them trapped behind the glass.

“I suppose this is going to be another reason for you to carry on not speaking, is it?”

For the first time I could hear a crack in Dad’s voice.

The woman on TV was running from a big explosion and the policeman was shooting into the flames. Dad stood in front of the telly and switched it off. The fire zooped into blackness.

“Look, if you just tell me what’s going on then maybe I can do something about it.”

Dad rolled his eyes, realised what he’d said.

“OK. I can’t do anything about moving here or that dog. I’ve told you why.” He crouched down in front of me. “Cally, please, just say something.”

I tried to will him to know how much more it was. You can’t just forget about things that mean so much to you. Even though Mum had died, he made it seem like we never knew her at all, like she never even existed. But she was here. I saw her, I felt her, especially when I was with Homeless.

“Has something happened at school?”

He waited. “Please, say something.”

I looked into his eyes. I could see a tiny dark silhouette of me. Inside I said, “Mum, I love that dog,” and she said, I know.

Then Dad went to the fridge, got another bottle of beer, said, “You know this not talking isn’t very clever. It’s not clever at all.”

I remembered when we all went to the Bishop’s Palace in Wells, by the big yellow cathedral. There was a moat and an open window by the drawbridge. Swans were waiting there. Two of them reached their necks up and pulled a blue rope to ring a bell. They were mute swans. They didn’t speak or squawk. They used the bell to tell someone they were hungry.

Mum said, “What beautiful creatures. Can you see how clever they are to find a way to speak to us like that, to speak of everything about themselves?”

And I felt the churning and the yearning inside for how Dad was back then. How he’d listened to her and looked at her. How he saw all of us, saw the way we wondered at the swans, and had said, “I see it too.”