Twisted Winter by Catherine Butler Read Free Book Online Page B

growing guilt.
    I turned back to the woman, just in time to see her gloved fingers delicately plucking a small black bead from her mouth, as if she were discreetly spitting out a cherry stone.
    â€œWhat did you do?” I demanded.
    She did not answer. Instead, she touched the bead to a bracelet of similar beads on her wrist, where it joined their ranks, smoothly and impossibly. Then she turned and strode away, down the path towards Creve.
    Watching Dill blunder towards the front door, I felt my heart lurch. His stubby feet were not sinking into the snow. He left no prints behind him.
    * * *
    I have guilt dreams sometimes. Dreams where I’ve killed somebody. I can’t remember who or why, but I know that I’ve done this terrible thing I can’t undo, and I just can’t believe it. When I wake up, the relief is indescribable.
    Walking into the house after Dill, I was filled with the guilt dream feeling. But this time I knew I really
had
done something terrible, and I wasn’t going to wake.
    Mum was on a ladder mending lights, her brown-and-grey curls scrunchied back. She grimaced when Dill ran wailing to the base of the ladder.
    â€œChloe, can you take him? Give him his colouring books.”
    Dill thumped my shoulders while I carried him to his play room, but he settled when I laid out his crayons and Disney colouring book. He loves colouring. It’s the only time he’s quiet. It’s like a drug. He loves vivid shades, particularly reds and blues. He can’t keep his scribbles inside the lines, but he tries. Mum says he’s artistic.
    And sometimes when I watch him colour, my mind is quiet too. I start to think that maybe he’s just a fat little bottle bursting with…
stuff
. Energy and craziness that comes out in screaming and breaking, except when it can come out in red and blue.
    Today was different, however. Dillon curled his fist around a red crayon, and drew it hard across Goofy’s muzzle. Nothing happened. No colour, no mark, not even a dent from the pressure. He scratched it desperately to and fro, so hard that thepage should have torn. It didn’t. Goofy smiled back unblemished.
    For a few seconds Dill could only croak, his mouth making rubbery, trembling shapes. Then his scream was like an earful of molten lead. I hushed him in vain, bounced him on my knee, and sang him songs. Big sister of the year. I felt like such a hypocrite.
    As lunchtime approached, a new dread seized me.
What if he can’t touch anything, including food? What if he can’t eat?
Mum was too busy to fix Dill’s lunch, so I took care of it, my heart hammering.
    As it turned out, he
could
eat. Or at least, he could eat things I’d chopped, mashed or broken up for him. But he couldn’t cut or chew things that were intact. His teeth couldn’t dent biscuits. Grapes went into his mouth, then came out whole and glossy with spit.
    I started to understand. The woman in the snow had promised that Dill could never spoil anything pristine again. So he couldn’t affect anything pure, clean or whole.
    He isn’t going to die
, I told myself.
It could be worse.
    But as I struggled through my lasagne, his future existence unrolled before me. What kind of life could he have if he could only eat food brokenup by someone else? What would happen when he went to school? He would never be able to write, draw, sign his name – maybe not even type into a keyboard. He would never be able to open envelopes, jars, tins, packets. He would be a freak forever, sliding off the surface of the world like raindrops off waxed cloth.
    * * *
    By mid-afternoon the sky was dim as twilight, and more flakes were flurrying down.
    I could still hear Dill’s desolate wailing while I scrubbed floors, bleached toilets and scraped the lime off shower screens. Nothing I did was undone. No thrown orange juice beakers left sticky patches on the carpets. No jam murals appeared in the corridors.
    I was