Blood Family by Anne Fine Read Free Book Online

rushing around my body, doing its job.’
    ‘It’s blue?’
    ‘Not really. Yes, the lines look blue, but if I cut myself, it would bleed red.’ I took his soft little paw. ‘And you’ve got blood in there too. It’s just your skin’s so fresh and young that we can’t see it going round.’
    I let him leave his hand beside my battered old one for a while, and then I said, ‘The blood in me is the same sort my mum and dad had. And the blood in you is like your mum and dad’s. That’s why some people call your mum and dad and brothers and sisters your “blood family”.’ I pulled him closer. ‘And mostly families work well and babies grow up there. But sometimes things go wrong, like they did for you, and then people like Rob and Suedecide it would be better if you come to stay with people like us. Just for a while.’
    I felt him stiffen at those last few words, so said it yet again. ‘But you will never, ever go back to Harris.’
    ‘You promise ?’
    ‘I already did. About a hundred times.’
    ‘Not a hundred ,’ he rebuked me. ‘Not nearly a hundred . More like’ – he counted on his fingers ‘nearly ten ?’
    Oh, he was bright enough.
    He didn’t go to school at first. I reckoned if we kept him home, I could teach him to read a little quicker, one to one. (I used to be a teacher.) And so we started off with all my old staged readers. He knew the names of the letters, but still had to learn the phonic way of saying them. Then we were off. I bribed him along with little things he needed anyway. (I’d never seen a child with less in his Personal Box, and I was not sure when he would move on.) But after a while, as he began to get his confidence, the tiny treasures that I handed out were less important. He was on it in a flash, reading road signs to me whenever we went out, and almost incapable of pushing a shopping trolley past a sign without proudly reading it aloud to anyone around.
    That supermarket. The first time we went, his mouth dropped open and he followed me around quite mesmerized, like a small zombie. On an aisle end where they sell stuff off really cheap, close to the date stamp, he whispered excitedly, ‘I know them! We ate them a lot!’Once we were home and unpacked, I asked him what it was he’d liked so much about the place. First he said that it was the great long lights. Then that it was ‘so huge ’. Then, ‘So much stuff, but all in places .’ In the end I reckoned what struck him so forcibly was the sheer order of the shop. And after that, neither Alan nor I could do the shortest supermarket run without him begging, ‘Can I come?’
    I took him to the dentist, thinking that things were far worse than they were. Angela said to him, ‘Open your mouth for me, pet,’ and I expected to hear the usual cascade of clicks on the assistant’s keyboard as she flagged up each rotten stump and cavity – the usual stuff.
    But, no. ‘Well,’ Angela said when they were finished. ‘It’s not too good. But let’s be fair, it isn’t that bad either. We can deal with that.’
    His eyes were wide. I’d no idea what her words meant to him, but she says that her tack of treating all the children like adults and all the adults like children has worked so far, so she keeps to it, even with my strange brood.
    She turned to me. ‘Most of that rather weird-looking mess is normal. Things falling out and others growing in. There are some cavities I’ll fill next week. But’ – here she smiled at Eddie – ‘ someone around here has clearly been looking after his gums and using his toothbrush. So, well done you.’
    Eddie looked pleased. He lapped up praise. It madehim almost radiant. ‘I didn’t always use the toothbrush,’ he confessed to me on the drive home. ‘But Mr Perkins took us to see a dentist and he told us that, in an emergency, like if we went camping and forgot to pack it, we can do a pretty good job using a finger.’
    By then I had become accustomed to what Alan had