Letting You Go by Anouska Knight Read Free Book Online

brought two balled fists down hard on her bonnet. Alex flinched. He seemed to approve of her silly girlish movement. ‘You stupid tart. Watch where you’re going,’ he delivered, his Hollywood smile sharpening the words as they left his mouth. Alex’s mouth dropped open a little, a nervous thumping started in her chest as he pushed himself off her truck and casually strolled over to the black four-by-four parked across the street. Alex swallowed and found her voice again.
    ‘Nice,’ she muttered, once the ape was safely back inside his truck and
definitely
couldn’t hear her. Alex had a rule about confrontation. She didn’t do it. Jem was the sister for that. Jem wasn’t backwards in going forwards like Alex, she was made of tougher stuff. Jem would’ve smiled sweetly just then and flipped the horrible git the Vs. Jem wouldn’t have been intimidated, she’d singlehandedly confronted a group of teenagers once for calling Millie Fairbanks
Clubfoot
; the girl had no fear.
    Alex began cruising again along the last of the high street. She drove steadily past her father’s garage still with its heavy arched wooden doors in blue keeping her eyes well and truly off the hardware shop opposite as if merely glancing there would constitute an act of total betrayal. She drove towards the little primary school with its bright hanging baskets and sunflowers grown spindly through the summer holidays, on past the adjacent church – also St Cuthbert’s – with its newly refurbished railings and worn stone path. Her mum had been round there last night, alone, slumped over in the churchyard before Mal Sinclair had found her. Alex’s throat tightened. The hospital was only another two miles beyond the bridge, it was hard to resist pressing down a little harder on the accelerator but this was the stretch of road where Millie Fairbanks had lost two inches off her left leg after Finn’s dad had signed their faulty car off.
    Alex tried to take the incline of the old bridge in the wrong gear and the truck juddered around her in protest. She dropped it down to second. Ted reckoned you couldalways tell a local from an outsider on how slow they took the bridge.
Bloody tourists, careering in and out like they own the place.
Even over the ruckus in the pub on backgammon nights, Alex’s dad had said how they’d hear the screeching of tyres when some wazzock took the bridge too fast. Every time they heard the screech, Hamish would put a pound in the pot, ready for the next time he had to have his beer-garden wall rebuilt. ‘Someone is going to get themselves killed at the bottom of that bridge someday,’ Hamish liked to warn his patrons, ‘as if the Fairbanks girl hadn’t come close enough.’
    Alex took the bridge cautiously. The Old Girl and the rest of Eilidh high street fell away in her rear view mirror, Alex’s shoulders releasing a little the more the bridge shrank into the distance. A light twinkling of morning sun on water held Alex’s attention on the disappearing view. It made her feel sorry to leave it back there without a proper look, it wasn’t often she thought the Old Girl pretty. She had time for a little look.
    Alex pulled over onto the side of the road in case she nearly killed anyone else before breakfast and shut the engine off. Her door cranked outwards like an arthritic hip. She sat there for a few moments with her feet on the cool earth outside the truck. It was so quiet here. Alex held her face to the sky. The air felt lighter up here in the Falls, lighter than it did back in the city anyway. Cleaner. Good for the soul. She’d taken it for granted as a child. She wanted to inflate herself with it now, purify herself with it. Alexclambered from her truck before even questioning herself and slammed the door shut behind her. The morning sun was spreading its greeting along the river catching like crystals on its changing surface. She’d spent so much energy distancing herself from this place, she’d almost