A Little Stranger by Candia McWilliam Read Free Book Online

Bet was a short woman and she was squinting up at my leafy head. I tried to coil up the long thorny sucker, could not, and chopped it in four. Its lowest thorns were hooks of grey, the fresh ones a translucent scarlet in the sun. I laid down these rosy scourges on the earth.
    ‘Yes?’
    ‘I can’t talk to a tree.’ I came out of the border altogether; at least Bet let me know exactly where I stood.
    ‘With my boys, I don’t always listen, but I’ve always got ears to hear.’
    ‘Something’s happened to one of the boys?’
    ‘It’s not one of my boys, it’s your one boy; it’s only a small thing, but I don’t like it. Tell me to mind my pros and cons if you like. I don’t want to worry you, or anything.’ She was suppressing her natural gossip’s instinct to spin out a small mystery; that was a mark of her affection for John.
    ‘What is it, Bet?’ I was not badly concerned, because I trusted her to show upset in proportion to what had caused it. ‘Have you heard him saying something bad, swearing or something?’
    ‘As if I’d be the one to fuss about that. No; it’s that Margaret. She’s all so ever so nice, I know, but she can’t listen out for him properly.’
    I didn’t want to hear petty tale-telling; I had overestimated Bet.
    ‘What do you mean?’
    ‘She takes him for a walk, sometimes even in the car, and she has him playing with her, but she can’t hear him. She has her soundtracks on the whole time.’
    ‘Soundtracks?’ I thought of a soundtrack for John, full of cooing and yelling and practice-sentences and the disappearing lisp.
    ‘Small earphones with loud music in. A sort of personal record-player. Kind of thing.’
    ‘Oh, those things. But I didn’t know Margaret had one of those. After all, she listens to the radio all day.’
    ‘Probably doesn’t know if it’s off or on. Like those people with no nerves, the ones in Russia. They couldn’t tell you if their appendix had burst, let alone if some little kid had hurt itself.’
    ‘But why should he hurt himself? Isn’t Margaret always with him?’
    ‘In a manner of speaking. But you can’t really chat to someone in one of those outfits; I should know that. My boys sleep in them. I’d as soon have had a blind dog look after my boys as a girl in all those wires.’
    ‘Hold on, Bet, I’ve not even seen her doing it.’
    ‘Of course you’ve not.’ She gave a meaning look.
    ‘And is it that bad anyway?’
    Deprived of her pellet of malice, Bet seemed disappointed. She sighed hard, and rolled her right thumb around and around the nail of her right index finger, looking down at her pointed red shoes among the thorns and used roses. She sighed again, theatrically, and muttered. What I heard was, ‘the heart doesn’t grieve after’.
    These spats were to be expected in a house full of women.
    I decided that I would speak to my husband if I saw an opportunity.

Chapter 11
    Bet and Edie arrived in the morning, just as John left for school. After school, too, he crossed with them, arriving as they left. He was becoming less womaned, losing these first sweethearts with whom he had flirted. That home-bound infant world, in which the broom cupboard and the kitchen are gynaecea, and the smells of Windolene and Brasso as feminine as attar, was shrinking. Bet and Edie, from being his intimates, were becoming to him people who came to clean the house, a thing he saw his parents not doing. To Margaret, I do not think that they were ever more than cleaners, though she did take a break with them halfway through the morning. They drank tea or coffee and ate what Lizzie called ‘ferocious quantities’ of cakes, winged with icing-soldered sponge, or sandwiched with glistening mocha. Margaret drank skimmed-milk milkshakes and valueless ducats of impacted puffed rice.
    There is a fatuous state in pregnancy when you know all is well, not only with yourself but with the world. You know that a species which has evolved this miraculous system