The Home Corner by Ruth Thomas Read Free Book Online

.’
    ‘Which was?’ Ed asked.
    ‘“I think I could eat one of Bellamy’s veal pies,”’ I informed him, hearing my voice clanking, loud and ridiculous, from my mouth. I looked down at the pavement – a slate-grey, potholed expanse undermined by tree roots. ‘That’s what he was supposed to have said, anyway,’ I ploughed on, feeling the colour developing in my cheeks. “I think I could eat one of Bellamy’s veal pies”. . . And then he just . . .’
    I paused, aware of him staring.
    ‘. . . died,’ I concluded.
    Ed was silent.
    ‘Nice one,’ he said after a moment.
    ‘Yeah.’ I couldn’t think of anything worse.
    ‘Cool. So. Anyway. Better get going.’
    ‘Right.’
    ‘My mum wants me to walk the dog this afternoon.’
    ‘Right.’
    And, without saying another word, Ed turned and walked away – he practically bounded, ran! – and then he disappeared around the corner of the road, and that was it. That was that. Life’s a Bitch ,I thought, and Then You Die. Which was absolutely correct.
    But what happens, I’d wondered, when you don’t die? Dying might have been an answer, but it was not an option.
    For the rest of that term, in art, I’d sat beneath a new poster that someone had stuck, belatedly, to the wall.
    Ars Longa, Vita Brevis.
    Though it seemed to me that it might be the other way round. Maybe life was going to be long, and art was going to be short.I’d been perfectly happy, once, sitting there drawing a plant or a bird or a bowl of fruit. But now I couldn’t concentrate. I sat very quietly, in the presence of Ed McRae, and tried not to breathe in the fumes of fixative and turpentine. I tried not to breathe too much at all.
    *
    I discovered later that a lot of what I’d imagined about Ed McRae was not quite true. For instance, he was not impoverished. He lived in a big house in one of the nicest parts of town. People didn’t habitually drink Irn-Bru there, or wear T-shirts with ironic slogans on them. They lived there discreetly, charmingly, mysteriously, as if they were the occupants of some enchanted land. It had, I supposed, something to do with wealth. With the easy trappings of it. The McRaes and their semi- ​detached neighbours all seemed to have at least two cars, and garages to park them in. They all had stained-glass panels in their vestibule windows and subtly blinking burglar alarms. There were no old sweetie wrappers on the pavements, or crisp packets or squashed cans of Lilt, such as could be seen on the pavements around our house. There were no billboards advertising chocolate bars and the latest blockbusters. The front gardens all seemed to contain the same colour of gravel and the same kinds of bench and terracotta flower tub. Little birds hopped obediently about the driveways and sang from the branches of the laurel and rhododendron trees. Everything was calm, ordered, expansive. Even the McRaes’ dog kennel was the size, practically, of our front porch! And their living room was so large that all the furniture just seemed to disappear into it, somehow, like space debris entering a black hole. I discovered this when I went to a party Ed held there at the end of that winter term – because I had made it, amazingly, despite my Bellamy’s veal pie comment – onto his invitation list. It was a New Year’s Eve party, and I had arrived; and as soon as I had arrived it was clear, from the number of people there, and the number of rooms in his house, that I was simply one of the multitude. Ed’s parents and younger brother were away at some skiing lodge in Fort William, and he had secretly invited half the people in our year – ‘a bus-load of folk’, he’d said – to see in the bells. There was nothing significant about my having been one of the bus-load. I did go there on the bus, although the rest of the bus-load seemed to have been driven there in their parents’ cars. I’d spent hours getting ready that evening, applying lip gloss ‘for kissable lips’