Frozen Billy by Anne Fine Read Free Book Online Page A

on my shoulder as I hurried past.
    â€˜Clarrie.’
    I hung my head, thinking she’d had enough of seeing me scuttle like a rat down her carpeted passages. ‘Yes, Madame Terrazini?’
    â€˜We have some business together, you and I.’
    I would have tried to find some way to excuse myself; but she could hear from the pattern of gasps behind that already the acrobats must be weaving their supple bodies into their last few astonishing patterns. In a moment they’d disentangle themselves for the last time and sweep off stage, leaving it free for Uncle Len to stroll on with his chair and Frozen Billy.
    She saw my hesitation. ‘Another time, then. Run along and watch over your brother.’
    Watch over, she said. Not watch, but watch over.
    I stared at her as she walked off. How had she guessed?
    But the answer came instantly. My brother had changed so much, no one could fail to notice. Even picking his way through street puddles two or three steps behind Uncle Len, he looked like an automaton. When people spoke, his eyes swivelled in their sockets and he held his questioner in an unblinking gaze. Sometimes it seemed as if he’d taught himself to slip through some small green baize door of his own between living child and cold, unfeeling figurine.
    And just as a clock has no feelings about the passage of time (‘So early!’ ‘Too late!’) to distract from the purpose of telling it, so Will, it seemed to me, had turned himself into a grim and monstrous little doll, the better to play his part.
    Even the act had changed. Day by day, so imperceptibly I scarcely noticed, a word changed here, a tone of voice hardened there, until I found myself shrinking behind the fluted pillar at the back of the stalls, sensing the chill that ran through the audience.
    The patter somehow gathered a threatening edge. Now, when my brother spoke, it seemed that Uncle Len’s eyes widened as much as Frozen Billy’s. There was a sense of menace in the air, and laughs grew scarcer as the audience gasped at the cruelties spat out by two snarling puppets.
    It made me shiver. But it was good for business. Seats filled on what were once the slackest days. The price of tickets rose, and still the people came in droves. There was talk round the town, till even over the long rolls of patterned Chinese silks in our little shop, the ladies were exchanging strange stories about the ventriloquist at the Alhambra and his sinister ‘twin’ schoolboys.
    At home, there was a kind of truce. Will passed Uncle Len’s plate along the table, or handed him the bread basket civilly enough. He answered questions about the neighbours who’d spoken to him on the stair, or how well he’d slept. But as he swung the cloak around his shoulders every night, he seemed to change. Sometimes he’d look at Uncle Len without a blink, and give a cold little smile as if to warn him, ‘Be on your guard tonight.’
    And sometimes, even from as far away as where I was standing at the back of the stalls, I could see panic in Uncle Len’s eyes as he struggled to keep pert answers firing out of Frozen Billy’s mouth. The shirts he handed me to wash came drenched in sweat now. The performance that had started in such hope and excitement was not really a ventriloquist’s act any longer.
    It had turned into something much darker and deeper.
    One night, Uncle Len and Will slid into battle from the start. When Will walked out on stage, Uncle Len turned the dummy’s head towards him as usual as he made Frozen Billy ask his first question: ‘And what did you learn in school today, little brother?’
    Will’s answer was a fresh one.
    â€˜School? I’ve not been in school for weeks now.’
    I could tell Uncle Len was startled. The best response he could make Frozen Billy offer was, ‘How so?’
    And Will was ready.
    â€˜Because I have a wicked uncle who has somehow turned me into