First Fruits by Penelope evans Read Free Book Online Page A

dressed and
standing next to me before certain others have even got their gym shoes off.
The black stuff blobbed around her eyes is mascara her mother doesn't know she
owns. It's Service in the City night, and again Dad won't be picking me up.
I'll be catching a bus from Aberdour Street Station, and as usual, Hilary will
be coming to keep me company. In fact, I'd go so far as to say that coming to
the bus station is the very highlight of her week.
    It may even be mine. We can walk out of
school at the same time as everybody else. There's no need to stand out, not tonight.
No-one is watching. The next best thing to being invisible.
    As for the other stuff - what happens at
that busy place, the bus station, week in, week out - that's just practise, a
way of reminding oneself exactly what it means to have It .
          
    Next morning though, the impossible has happened. Lydia
is even less of a pretty sight than usual.
    Her specs are sitting all lopsided on
her face, and one of the panes of glass is cracked. Hilary snorts and whispers
what it was she had seen in the changing rooms last night . Lydia had been on
her knees in the showers, fumbling in all the steam for her lost spectacles
while everybody else had stood by and screamed with laughter. Incredible that
Hilary hadn't stayed to see the end of that. But then, she does so love the bus
station.
    Lydia must have found her specs - but
just look at them now. And just look at her. The living, breathing picture of
misery. All because of a pair of glasses.
    Or is there something else? When I slip
a hand through her arm, and whisper Time for Greek in her ear, she
doesn't stir. Doesn't even seem to hear. She just continues to stare into the
distance, fascinated, for all I know, by a world divided into two unequal
halves by that crack running through the glass.
     But as Dad says, there's nothing worse
than folk who don't listen, so I naturally I try again.
    'Lydia, what ever's eating you? .
    And finally she deigns to pay attention.
'Nothing,' she says, though sulky with it. 'Nothing's eating me.'
    So I just look at her.
    Sure enough, a moment later it all comes
pouring out: 'It's my parents. They've said they have to go away next week, to
Venice. There's a conference. Daddy wasn't going to go, but he changed his mind
when they kept calling. They said it wouldn't be the same without him.'
    'What do they want him for?'
    This is Hilary butting in, suddenly too
nosy for her own good. You wouldn't have caught me asking. My dad gets invited
to conferences all the time. Good grief, he was in Scarborough only last week.
    Trust Lydia to have a reply ready,
though, as if it mattered. 'Trompetto. They want him to talk about Trompetto.'
    It's a surprise she can get the word
out, with all that metal in her mouth. And look, she's lost Hilary.
    'Tromp- who ?'
    'He's a painter, goofball,' I tell her.
'Fancy not knowing that.'
    It has to be said, though, I wouldn't
have known myself, not in the normal way. We don't hold with pictures in our
house. It's the Catholics who like that sort of stuff, Jesus and Mary and all,
trying to make out it's always Christmas. A bad case of  the graven images Dad
says. But there's still that picture above the desk in his study, the one I've
known since I was a little girl, showing Moses coming down from the mountain to
find the Israelites worshipping false gods. That's by him, this Trompetto person.
It's got his name on it. So you see, I know all about him. Yet no-one has asked
me to go all the way to Venice to give a talk.
    But hark at Lydia. 'My father knows more
about Trompetto than anyone in the whole world.'
    Suddenly, there's no mistaking the note
in her voice. Pride. One of the Seven deadly sins.
    'So what's the problem?'
    Lydia's face, lit up a moment ago,
becomes decently miserable again. ' I've got to go and stay with our
Aunty Jane. All the way down to Carlisle.'
    So there we have it. Her parents are
getting rid of her - if just for a while. And who