Stray Love by Kyo Maclear Read Free Book Online

mistakes, trains and planes weren’t safe, it was better to live inland than by open water, and—if you read the tabloids like
News of the World
—the streets were full of roving maniacs, perverts, arsonists and murderers. Stories above the middle crease were a kind of horrid stain that made people put their hands over their mouths. They were bleak events children weren’t meant to see.
    It was either a coincidence or a final act of shedding, but a month after this conversation, Oliver gave up the flat in Orme Square (where we had all lived before my mother disappeared). We moved to a skinny house in the middle of a row of skinny houses on New King’s Road in Hammersmith and Fulham, right across from a small park called Eel Brook Common. Itwas a former workman’s house, and it took me a while to get used to seeing our familiar belongings in cramped, unfamiliar surroundings. I kept staring at our old moss green settee thinking that it looked lost.
    Happily, between New Year’s and my ninth birthday in February, a space opened up at Kensington International School. Oliver promised it would be better than Draycott and this time he was right. Founded ten years earlier, Kensington was the choice of diplomats and visiting dignitaries from former and current British colonies. Some of the children came from plush homes in Belgravia and Knightsbridge. There was a large framed portrait of the Queen at the front of each classroom and children with skin of every colour seated at the desks. My class was an energetic crowd of Ugandan Asian, Irish, West Indian, Greek Cypriot, and Indian kids who often slipped into other languages while playing in the yard. The headmistress, Mrs. Heaney, ancient and thin-lipped, had a strange habit of speaking to our hairlines, and seldom to our eyes.
    A few of the children weren’t black or white but beige, like me. There were two girls, Hayley and Adele, daughters of a Trinidadian-born economist and white British mother, who proudly referred to themselves as “half-caste.” I had never heard the term before and was curious. Was that what I was?
    In the evenings, Oliver began spending more time on the telephone. At first I assumed he was fielding work-related calls, but then I noticed that his voice had a softer tone than usual. It made me suspicious. There was more space between his sentences, and his words had a vagueness that I somehow associated with romance. Whenever I approached, he would dissolve into silence or cover the mouthpiece until I moved away.
    I left him to his murmuring conversations.
    When I felt lonely, I would take out my sketchbook. I had taped the blurry photo of my mother to the inside back cover and would sneak peeks at it. I began to look forward to school each day. Kensington had several kind teachers, mostly young women, who warmed to Oliver and me. My favourite, Miss Humphreys, wore tortoiseshell glasses and a silk scarf tied around her neck like a French woman. She tucked in my collar and once even offered to mend a hole in Oliver’s jacket. We must have appeared wrinkled and chaotic to her. It must have been clear we were missing a woman’s touch.
    Then we met Pippa. She had moved into a house several doors down—a flat with a thickly painted blue door—when I was nine years old. She came from Poland by way of Canada but had been living in London for almost thirteen years and considered herself English. She had dark brown hair that ended halfway down her back. Her face was pretty but there was a hatching of lines around her eyes even when she wasn’t smiling.
    We met her at the park across the street in early spring. She was photographing a tree, though she held the camera at a strange and distracted angle, glancing around every so often. When she noticed me watching her, she lowered her camera and waved.
    “Hi!” she shouted out, and walked over to us.
    “I’m Pippa,” she said, breathless, holding out her hand.
    Oliver stared at her face and at her