Crossing the Line by Gillian Philip Read Free Book Online

rabbit in headlights, staring at the wall. ‘She won’t be long, Lola Nan,’ I said. ‘I think Mrs Mahon’s going soon. You can go back down in a minute.’
    She was doing that thing again, patting the air. Crouching, I caught her hand. I smiled at her, even though her fingers tightened reflexively around mine and she was just about breaking the bones. Tears glittering in her washed-out eyes, she opened her mouth and made sucking sounds, as if she was experimenting with saying something. Then her eyes swam into focus, her brows dipped together and she hollered at me.
    â€˜We were talking! Private! Go away!’
    Then she screamed, incoherently, screamed till her eye sockets darkened and her papery skin rippled and her electric-shock hair quivered with the effort.
    I sighed and stood up, prising off her hand. Who was she talking to? Bloody Granda? Hell, I thought, if Allie can have an imaginary friend, why not Lola Nan? She was probably more in need of one, and Lola Nan wasn’t breaking anybody’s heart. There was no point taking offence. After all, an illness wasn’t a personal insult. Sometimes I was afraid a small real Lola Nan was inside that head, battering her fists against her cage. I could imagine her ricocheting around inside her empty skull, bouncing off the bone walls like a crazy pinball lost in the machine, howling in frustration, and that was why she sometimes yelled and howled at me.
    But probably not. She was probably dead already, the Lola Nan who used to take me on her lap and sing and hum like the rails, before she went off them.
    I crept on to the landing and bent over the banisters.The women were in the hallway, and I could hear about half their murmured words. Most were Mum’s, and I have to say I was impressed. She comforts for a living, after all; she could comfort for her country, and she was saying the sort of things to Mrs Mahon that I never could. If she was good at nothing else, she was good at sympathising, and I felt a reluctant embarrassed pride.
    Then she blew it.
    She touched Aidan’s mum’s upper arm and Aidan’s mum tried hard not to flinch, because if she was anything like Orla she didn’t like gratuitous touching. (Luckily I hadn’t yet made the mistake of trying, but I’d been witness to a nasty incident with Kev Naughton.) Mum must have sensed resistance, because she let go of Mrs Mahon’s arm. On an afterthought, she snatched the woman’s hand and gave it a comforting squeeze.
    â€˜Remember,’ said Mum, ‘God never gives us a burden greater than we can bear.’
    It was one of her favourites. I’d heard it before, on Words of Utterly Fatuous Folk-Wisdom, and I’d thought it a clunker even then. Now I shut my eyes and gripped the banister rail, hoping I wasn’t going to be tipped over by the dizzying wave of shame.
    Sometimes a parent says something so embarrassing you want to die. And sometimes dying just isn’t enough: you want to kill the parent too. That was it for me. Mum explaining to a dead boy’s mother that her nebulous God didn’t actually have it in for her; he was only playingsome cosmic game of Buckaroo. And presumably, when Aidan’s devastated dad walked out on what was left of his family, God had been a little careless hooking on the Stetson.
    Aidan’s mum never let on, though. I suppose she was too polite and she didn’t want Mum to feel awkward. I couldn’t see her face but I suppose she just smiled at Mum and walked quietly out and closed the door. When her blurred shadow was gone from the patterned glass and her car door had clunked shut and the engine coughed, purred and faded, Mum put her face in her hands and started to cry.
    I left her to it.

4
    Kevin Naughton killed him. Kevin Naughton killed my sister’s boyfriend with a Valu-Pack Stay-Sharp vegetable knife; he stuck it in the brother of the girl I love and severed his subcostal