The Crane Wife by Patrick Ness Read Free Book Online Page B

Panadol never made anyone look that way.
    ‘Well, don’t
cry
about it,’ Amanda said, but it was too late.
    Karen, it turned out, had been ‘fiddled with’ – Karen’s own horrible, multiply-repeated phrase – by her grandfather from ages five to fourteen. It only stopped when he’d died. Not only that, when she’d told her parents, they’d thrown her briefly out of the house, allowing her back to do A-levels only when she’d completely recanted.
    ‘You don’t know,’ she’d sobbed into Amanda’s arms in the long, long hours that followed. ‘You just don’t know.’
    ‘I’m sorry,’ Amanda said, awkwardly patting Karen’s head. ‘No, I don’t.’
    It might have brought them closer together. It probably
should
have, but instead, Karen started bringing friends over with whom she’d abruptly stop talking whenever Amanda entered the room. And that, once more, was that.
    The baffling thing was that she had no idea
why.
Her childhood had been perfectly normal, from what she could tell. She was still close to both George and Clare, despite the divorce, and there’d never been any undue worry about money or security. It just felt like she’d been born with a small flaw, right at the centre of herself, a flaw somehow too shameful to be shown to anyone else, so she’d spent her life building a carapace around it to keep it hidden. Inevitably, the carapace
became
her true self, a fact she could never quite see, a fact that might have offered relief. Because all
she
knew was the truth deep inside of her, the little something wrong no one else could ever, ever know. And if that wasn’t the real her, then what was? At her core, she was broken, and life was just one long attempt to distract people from noticing.
    ‘Are you having a good time, sweetheart?’ her father would ask in his every-other-day call.
    ‘Yes, Dad,
Jesus
,’ she would say to keep from crying.
    ‘Because everyone says your college years are your best years, but I have to confess, I found them sort of awkward and . . . Well, awkward actually about covers it.’
    ‘You find everything awkward, George,’ she’d said, bending at the waist to stop the sob rising in her throat.
    He’d laughed. ‘I suppose so.’ Which was so upsetting somehow – his kindness, the pointlessness of it – that when he’d asked, ‘Are you sure you don’t need any more money?’, she’d had to hang up on him.
    Rachel and Mei sat down, taking up five-sixths of the picnic blanket between them. It wasn’t quite warm enough for a picnic, really, but Rachel liked these sorts of gruelling challenges, wanting to see, Amanda thought, how much she could get her friends to put up with. If you complained, you lost.
    ‘So who’s looking after JP?’ Rachel asked, not taking off her coat.
    ‘My dad,’ Amanda said, looking through the basket and failing to find anything she liked to eat. She settled on a plastic tub of salad. ‘Is there dressing?’
    Another pause, then another quiet, shared laugh between Mei and Rachel. Amanda ignored it and found, at least, a small, very expensive-looking bottle of olive oil. She poured it sparingly over the greens and the other greens and the various other greens besides those. She screwed the cap on too vigorously and felt it snap under her fingers. It now spun fruitlessly and refused to stay on. She carefully put it back into the picnic basket, setting the cap on it in a way that at least made it
look
closed, checking to be sure that neither Rachel nor Mei had seen.
    ‘My dad would never babysit,’ Rachel said, pouring a mug of coffee from an outrageously sleek thermos. ‘Never changed a nappy in his life? Didn’t bother learning our names until we were five?’
    ‘Oh, please,’ Mei said, surprising both Amanda and, it seemed, herself, before quickly re-shaping her face into one of cheerful acquiescence. Amanda didn’t dare hope for solidarity here; it was probably just how much Rachel liked to play up the