Gold by Chris Cleave Read Free Book Online Page A

notice the little sideways glances they shot at her while they pretended they weren’t looking. They would start to have arguments with each other, about stupid things like training hours and long-grain rice, and they wouldn’t even know why they were doing it. She would know, though. It meant that they were scared for her all over again, and she would have to do one of the things that made them forget it for another hour.
    If you were in the car, you could kick the back of the seat. That made them annoyed, which was the opposite of scared. If you were in the house, you had more choices. You could answer back or be lippy, which made you seem less ill. You could do a drawing. You could hurry up the stairs and make a lot of noise so they noticed you doing it, even if you had to lie down on your bed afterwards for ten minutes. You could make it look like you’d eaten all your toast, even if you had to post it down your T-shirt and flush it in the toilet later. You could play boys’ games like Star Wars that had fighting and spaceships and made you look tough, even if you weren’t tough enough to ride a bike.
    Night was more difficult. At night when you had nightmares, and when Mum or Dad came running, you could tell them it was about a wolf or a robber—the stuff that healthy kids had nightmares about—and not Death, that made you so scared you could never even make your voice come out to call for Mum and Dad. When you got Death,you just had to keep quiet. Other nights, you could pretend to be asleep when Mum came in to check on you at ten p.m., one a.m., and four a.m. If you set your iPod alarm for five minutes before hers, you could make it seem as though you slept soundly, even if you were really reading Star Wars comics half the night.
    There were a hundred things you could do to make Mum and Dad not worry. You could polish your own shoes and clean your teeth and get dressed nicely, even though you were so tired all you wanted to do was lie down and close your eyes. You could talk about the future—they liked it when you talked about the future, so long as it was close. If you said “Tomorrow can I go to the shops with you?” it made them happy, because it meant you were being optimistic. Dr. Hewitt called it positive engagement and it was a sign that you weren’t suffering from the thing everyone was most scared of, which was failure to thrive. So if you said “Can I go to the shops tomorrow?” they would say “Great!” But if you said “Next year can we go to France for our holidays?” then they would get a hollow look in their eyes, and give each other those sideways glances, and say something like “Let’s just take it a day at a time, shall we?”
    If you wanted them to not worry, there were also a hundred things you could not do. You could not cough, you could not be sick, and you could never say you were tired or sad. If you actually were sick there were ways to hide it, and if you actually were sad there were ways too.
    There were so many ways to make Mum and Dad not worry, it was easy to think of a thing for every single hour. The only hard bit was that all of it made you very tired, which was one of the main things you had to never be. That was why you had to rest like this sometimes, in the toilet, in the dark.
    Now that she’d rested, Sophie reached up and pulled the light cord. The wooden handle had come off the end and got lost, and Mum had tied on one of her Commonwealth gold medals in its place. It swung in the light of the bare bulb, flashing as it spun.
    Music started up from the kitchen. Sophie smiled. Dad was in a good mood. The Jesus and Mary Chain were doing “Never Understand.”
    Dad’s music was shit.
    Through the toilet door she could hear Dad singing along. It sounded like anyone’s dad singing words. Sophie loved the moments when Mum and Dad were happy. If you concentrated and arranged them in your memory then you could collect them, like old copper coins, or