The Home Corner by Ruth Thomas Read Free Book Online Page B

badly, I realised; on the fleshy part of it, beneath the knuckle of my little finger.
    ‘Want to run it under a tap?’
    ‘No thanks,’ I said, dabbing tomato sauce off my palm onto the edge of Mrs McRae’s tablecloth. Because I was determined, for some reason, to stay exactly where I was. I felt that if I did that, nothing too bad would happen.
    ‘So, what universities are you putting on your UCCA form?’ Craig asked after a moment’s pause, as the minute hand of the clock moved slowly, slowly towards the number seven.
    ‘What?’ I asked, still dabbing, and I looked up again. Craig’s blackberry eyes were swimming alarmingly in and out of focus.
    ‘What universities –’ he began very clearly.
    And that was the moment when Ed McRae had finally – finally! – appeared in the kitchen. There he was, transported from somewhere else, holding an opened bottle of red wine.
    ‘Hi, Luisa. Top-up?’ he asked, striding towards me.
    I was so overcome by his presence that I couldn’t speak.
    ‘When did you get here?’ he asked.
    ‘I don’t know,’ I said.
    He looked at me.
    ‘Thank,’ I added, holding my glass out like Oliver Twist with his tragic little bowl of gruel.
    ‘ Thank ?’ Ed asked, staring at me too, and grinning. Ed and Craig, both. Grinning at me.
    ‘-ks,’ I said.
    ‘Oh: “ thanks ”.’
    And, wordlessly, he poured more wine into my glass, right up to the top, glanced briefly at my small suggestion of cleavage; at the silver button that coincided with it, and then walked back out of the room.
    ‘So, where were we?’ asked Craig. ‘What were we talking about?’
    I felt a kind of weariness, like a low mist, come rolling into my head.
    ‘Oh yes: about the UCCA form.’
    I didn’t reply. I stood against the warmth of Mrs McRae’s Aga for a while – or maybe it was for a long time: it had become hard to tell, with the way the clock was behaving and Time having altered its nature. I stood there, anyway, with Craig Dillard, and watched the rest of the party happening a long way away without me, through the open kitchen door. Somebody, I noticed – Mrs McRae perhaps – had wound swathes of silver tinsel around the stair banisters and hung bunches of mistletoe from all the doorways leading off the hall. And it was all silver: silver and white. Mrs McRae (or whoever it was) had even gone out into the front garden and continued the festive theme out there, with silver lights in the trees. I had never known that kind of house or garden, or that way of living. Lights in the trees would have horrified our neighbours. And I thought suddenly of my mother, who always got out the same concertinaed paper bells every December from the same battered cardboard box marked XMAS and hung them in our porch. There was also a concertinaed robin in the box. It was put up with the bells, its feet brushing the heads of visitors when they came to the house.
    Ed was standing in the hall now, telling people a joke, and everyone was laughing. Oh, because he was a funny boy! He was funny and quick and creative and beautiful. And sitting, wise and beautiful too, in the glass arch above the McRae’s front door, was the moon. ‘Look at the moon,’ I announced to Craig. The moon, and Ed McRae, seemed suddenly more important than anything I’d ever seen. I wanted it to be just me and the moon and Ed McRae. I wanted to paint a picture of them. And I knew for an absolute fact that I did not want to study geography for as long as I lived. I didn’t want to leave school and study  it at university, as I was supposed to do. Because studying geography appeared to lead to claims on the land: to hacking lumps of rock out of the earth. Basalt and quartz and pearlite. It led, eventually, to people like Craig Dillard going up to the moon in rockets and trudging around it, defacing it with their moon buggies and their gauges and flags and probes and their stupid moon boots. Geography was not for me.
    I was aware of Craig still