Living with Strangers by Elizabeth Ellis Read Free Book Online Page A

found your address. There’s an old notebook in Molly’s desk where she keeps the writing paper. When she was in the garden I started looking through it and found Uncle Stefan: 6103 Montgomery Drive, Vancouver BC, Canada. There’s a red star thing next to it so I guessed it must be important. I know you’re staying with Uncle Stefan because I heard Molly on the phone to him the other day. She asked to speak to you but you must have been out. Anyway, I also heard you’ve got a job packing fish. Yuk! Bet you smell something rotten now – good job you’re 6000 miles away.
    The other day I got a book out of the library all about Canada. Is it really that cold in the winter? Perhaps it’s different in Vancouver. Will you write back I wonder, now you’re settled? Will you tell me about it? I know how you hate writing, it takes you so long. But a line or two would be good. Just so I know. Just so you don’t forget me.
    I’ve got to fetch Paul from the swimming pool so I’ll finish now. If you really are staying with Uncle Stefan – this should find you. Don’t think I’ll tell anyone I’m writing though. Best not to.
    M x

    The day after Josef leaves, I go into the garden and hide among the raspberry canes. I sit crying on an old upturned bucket. Later, I’m violently sick in the bathroom, retching and choking until nothing more will come. Molly hears me and calls from outside the door; she sounds angry, as if I have no business being ill. I go to lie down on my bed, light-headed and sore, unable to think.
    In the weeks that follow, I grow fierce, or suddenly sullen, then intensely sad, crying at night, in the morning, in the canteen at school. Life is disconnected. I wander outside normal parameters, apart and unattached, rolling in one direction while the rest of the world rolls in another. Adjacent cogs, functioning at a tangent.
    I miss Josef most at mealtimes; his place opposite mine gapes vacantly. We still assemble at suppertime – the little ones, Molly, Saul and I – but we sit amid the stunned silence now, passing dishes between us like offerings we are too shocked to acknowledge. Sophie watches, her large eyes confused, searching for a cue, the moment that will give her permission to speak. But no cue comes and she sits, meal after meal, infected by the sadness, reprimanded by association and not knowing why.
    Paul tries. Paul always tries. The sudden silence at the table he takes as an excuse to fill the gaps, for asking the obvious questions that I dare not: Where’s Josef? When’s he coming home? Is he ill? Is he dead? Molly and Saul exchange a glance, Molly puts a gentle hand on Paul’s wrist so that he too looks from one to the other, bewildered. And Saul, always last to leave the table, waiting for the room to clear before lighting his pipe, now often stands up in the middle of the meal as if he’s suddenly remembered something, and leaves us, his food half-eaten, congealed on the plate.
    I begin to adopt strange eating habits, one day ravenously hungry, the next wanting nothing at all. I lose weight; my hair, thick and stubbornly wavy like Molly’s, begins to fall out in handfuls, which I gather up and put in the dustbin so that no one will see. I grow spots across my back and forehead. If I’m not being sick I catch a succession of colds, feverish things that last for weeks. Molly watches me from a distance, tempting me with food she spends hours preparing, cloistered in the kitchen while Saul shuts himself away in his study.
    We are all three shut away then, each to our own corner, quietly moving back to back, avoiding eyes and common spaces, not looking as we take refuge in the silence. Only Paul and Sophie connect us, their childish optimism overlays it all with an innocent veneer of chatter, routine, normality. I ask them later what they remember from that time. It transpires they have barely a memory at all, Josef a faint presence fabricated from the few photos we have and the aching