The True Story of Spit MacPhee by James Aldridge Read Free Book Online

if it astounded him that she couldn’t just walk straight in and do what he did.
    ‘Just paddle your arms and legs,’ he shouted at her.
    Mrs Tree listened and watched and took the girl’s punishment for her, but she said nothing. Sadie was twice in tears, shouting (for her) at Spit, ‘I can’t. I can’t …’ which Spit treated with anguish and contempt. ‘Yes you can,’ he said. ‘You’re not even trying, Sadie. Look.’
    To demonstrate the ease of it, Spit was under and over the water and halfway across the river and back in a violent, skilful, splashing demonstration of how easy it was.
    ‘I’ll never get it,’ Sadie said.
    ‘Go on. You just have to do it.’
    In the end she did it, so that in those first miraculous strokes of a dog-paddle Sadie accepted thereafter a lifelong debt to Spit. Her mother too was so pleased that she insisted on Spit (dripping wet) sitting in the kitchen and drinking a glass of raspberry vinegar. It was the first time that Spit had been invited to sit in anybody’s kitchen, and though he was always bold in the grip of a new experience, he was about to leave quick. But then Mrs Tree offered him a second glass. Anything more than the essentials was manna to Spit. He would sometimes buy an icecream or an aniseed ball because he had a sweet tooth, or a snowball for a penny, but this was a different kind of indulgence so he said, ‘Yes thanks,’ and Mrs Tree gave him the second glass of the thick red cordial. Sadie had been watching him and smiling, still happy with her first few strokes in the water.
    ‘Can we do it again tomorrow?’ she asked him.
    ‘All right,’ Spit said. ‘But you have to learn to put your head under. It’s no use learning to swim unless you can put your head under.’
    ‘All right, all right,’ Sadie said. ‘I’ll give it a go.’
    Mrs Tree watched them both, and in a moment’s pause between Spit’s long draughts of the red vinegar she said, ‘How old are you, Spit?’
    ‘Eleven,’ he said, and then as if in this silent kitchen he had suddenly heard the violence of his own voice for the first time, he said it again a little quieter, and he retreated too. ‘I’m eleven now, Mrs Tree,’ he said, ‘but I’ll be twelve next birthday.’
    ‘I thought so,’ Mrs Tree said. ‘You’re the same age as Sadie. She’ll be eleven in January. When is your birthday?’
    ‘Last week – the fourteenth,’ he said.
    It was, in its way, another tie, and instead of wanting to get out quick Spit looked around him at the kitchen and, seeing an old, marbled, mantle clock above the fireplace, he said, ‘We can fix that if it stops.’
    ‘I know,’ Mrs Tree said. ‘But it’s still going strong. It belonged to my father.’
    ‘It probably needs cleaning,’ Spit said.
    ‘No. I think it’s all right,’ Mrs Tree said.
    ‘Well … if it stops,’ Spit said threateningly at the clock.
    ‘Don’t worry,’ Mrs Tree said. ‘We’ll have it around to your grandfather in a jiffy.’
    Though Spit and his grandfather seemed only able to shout at each other, Spit was also used to long silences with old Fyfe, so it was easy for him to sit in this kitchen of silence with two people who said little or nothing at all. He had finished his raspberry vinegar and he was aware that Mrs Tree was looking at him the way nobody else in the town looked at him, although he didn’t know what exactly it meant. Sadie seemed simply to be waiting for him to do something or to tell them something. When he finally decided it was necessary he said to her at the top of his voice, ‘I’m going fishing tonight by the willows. Do you want to come?’
    ‘In the dark?’ she said.
    ‘Of course. That’s the best time, up by the willows.’
    ‘What will your grandfather say?’ Sadie asked him.
    Spit looked surprised. ‘Nothing,’ he said. ‘I’m always up there. Sometimes he comes with me.’
    ‘Is he going with you tonight?’ Sadie asked.
    ‘No. He’s …’ Whatever Spit