Silver by Scott Cairns Read Free Book Online Page B

heavily lidded as if caught in moment of deep slumber. It occurred to me as I took him in that if my father could be a woman, then so could he. I frowned, closing my eyes, my head swaying with the tilt of the carriage. I tried to summon an image of my father but try as I might I could not repress the vision of him as last I had seen him. I rubbed my eyes before alighting on the next scene as the cab slowed down at a junction. A girl of about sixteen was stood in the shade of a tree blowing her hands and jigging, to keep her feet from absorbing the ice cold from the flagstones beneath. Her clothes were dull and worn and she blended in very well with the streets behind her. I caught myself leaning forward, taking a grip of the window ledge as the cab began to move and with it my view of the girl. I stared hard. Could there be any doubting that she was female? Had she not wide hips and a narrow waist evident even in her heavy winter clothes? As the distance began to grow, I could no longer discern her features but instead I filled in my father’s face across her own plain one. I could not see how it could ever be so. Yet had I not seen it with my own eyes? My eyes could not rest upon anything for long as I looked around the shabby interior of the cab for some answers. Familiar as I was with John’s anatomy, could it be that all men were endowed equally? Mine was not a mind accustomed to such thoughts and I felt strange, imagining the naked form of my father, but perhaps there was a more satisfying answer to all of this than at first was thought. I began to fancy that perhaps a medical condition of age could cause such a change. I had not been aware of my shoulders having been drawn up tight but along with this thought, I had relaxed them and at once had grown weary. I imagined then that the matter could instead be a medical peculiarity rather than admit that my father, my own life, my own parents had been a lie.
            At the moment that it dawned on me, a sudden emptiness washed over me. My mother had known! How could she not? The enormity of this realisation struck me cold across my cheek and I felt as if she herself had slapped me. The familiar sense of struggling to breathe inside a thick fog threatened to choke me. My mother had known and she had not shared it with me. I considered the ramifications of this latest revelation. She must have known everything! For some reason, this felt like an even bigger betrayal and such was the distance of my grief for my loss of her that it felt easier to be angrier at her all of a sudden. How could she have not known?
            In my sleep-deprived state of shock, a jumble of images chased themselves across my mind; my mother waving from the bank of the lake as my father rowed me and a friend around the water in a lopsided circle. I must have been about 12 or so and the friend turned out to be a petty girl, Melanie, whom I would later fall out with rather spectacularly about John.  I remember I rather sullenly chastised him for his idiocy but secretly, my heart was filled with pride as Melanie giggled at him. Her own father, I remember, was quite the bully and was permanently finding new ways to demean either one of his three daughters. Evidently, he had so wanted a son that he failed quite completely to take any pleasure in his children. Whilst I had often longed for a brother or a sister, I was glad at times not to have to share my father and this was one of those times. The images faded and another replaced it. My father sat at the breakfast table as I entered the dining room, my mother stood behind him as she leaned across to take some of his bread. She giggled as my father caught her wrist and pulled her bodily into the back of his chair. He was beaming broadly as he caught sight of me, and winked. When she saw me, she blushed and hurried to straighten her blouse.
    “ Your father is a devil, is he not Imogen?”
    They were always so affectionate and they were how I