Still Waters by Katie Flynn Read Free Book Online Page B

‘I’m just a-goin’ to have a peep at the gals,’ so, forewarned, Tess closed her eyes and tried to look as though she had been asleep for hours. She obviously succeeded, too, since Mrs Thrower tiptoed back to her own room and then said loudly, as though the walls were at least two foot thick, ‘Fast off, the pair of ’em! They’d sleep the clock round, no error, if we ‘lowed it.’
    ‘I wou’n’t mind sleepin’ the clock round,’ Mr Thrower said wistfully. ‘Still, we’ll hev a bit of a lie-in, hey old gal?’
    ‘I’ll see,’ Mrs Thrower said. The bedsprings creaked. Any minute now everyone will be asleep, me as well, Tess thought hopefully, and sure enough presently echoing snores began to sound. Mr Thrower was plainly in the land of Nod, though his wife said his name crossly a couple of times before succumbing as well.
    Mrs Thrower snores ladylike, Tess told herself, still awake and listening. I wonder if all ladies snore higher than men? And then Janet turned on to her back, kicking Tess in the knee as she did so, and proved that girls, too, can snore almost as deeply as men.
    I’ll never get to sleep, poor Tess thought, as Janet’s snores, and those of the elder Throwers, began to compete for her attention. And when morning comes I’ll be all stupid and dopey, and they’ll think I’m ill and send me home! Oh, I must go to sleep, I must! She turned on her side, her knees caught Janet a well-deserved wallop, and Janet moaned something and turned too.
    Miraculously, silence descended. The rhythmic roars which Tess had likened, in her own mind, to that of a pig being strangled, ceased. With a sigh of real thankfulness, Tess curled up, put her thumb in her mouth, and was immediately asleep.
    And at some point in the night she found herself on her dream-beach in a pink-and-white-striped dress and frilly knickers, looking down into the cradling sea-water and worrying about her drowning shoes.
    Tess awoke suddenly, as she always did from the dream, and immediately, as though she had lain here for hours working things out, she realised what she must always have known, even when she was trying to agree with Daddy that the dream simply must be pretend. She had dreamed the dream long before that first trip to the seaside with Uncle Phil. She was absolutely sure of it, now that she thought. Time, when you still aren’t into double figures, takes such an age to move that you can remember what happened and when very accurately and she just knew she had been dreaming the dream long before her fifth birthday. Because it was on the day following her fifth birthday that Uncle Phil had called round, shoved her into the back of his old Morris Minor with four or five of her dreadful cousins, and driven the whole crowd of them down to Great Yarmouth, to have a day on the beach and a picnic, and afterwards to go up to the funfair and enjoy a few of the rides.
    ‘She want the company of other kids, bor,’ Uncle Phil had bawled at Peter, putting on a Norfolk accent to try to make his brother smile. ‘Do my kids eat her, I’ll pay you compensation, that I ’ull!’
    Daddy had laughed, then, and leaned into the car and kissed Tess on the nose and told her to have a good day or he’d tan her backside for her. And, knowing she was watching, he had walked back into the house doing his Charlie Chaplin walk to make her laugh, and Uncle Phil had said that Pete had always been a card and did she, Tess, like fish and chips?
    So now, Tess lay on her back with Janet’s warm bulk pressed against her side and told herself that she would find out, one day, just why she dreamed the dream. I’ll find the boy, she decided, and he can tell me. Daddy won’t, but that boy would.
    And it was the first time, ever, that she had admitted to herself that she believed Peter knew more about her dream than he was prepared to tell.
    Very early that morning Marianne Dupré had ridden her bicycle down Deeping Lane, not hurrying but enjoying the