World's End in Winter by Monica Dickens Read Free Book Online

can have the costume my mother made,’ Sonia said in that voice as if she had a clothes peg on the top of her nose.
    ‘I won’t be here.’
    ’Now Em, just because you can’t have the main part.
    It‘s the show that matters, you know.
    The play’s the thing.’
    I‘m going away with my father.’
    ‘Whereto?’ ’Switzerland.’
    ‘Lucky you,’ Mrs Reeper said in her flutey acting voice that did not show whether she believed it or not.
    Nobody understood the size of the disaster.
    Mother said, ’What a shame. But I’d have been proud of you as a candle anyway, especially if I didn’t have to make the costume.’ It was all right for her. She’d had her day on the stage before Dad took her off it to the altar.
    Carrie said, ’That stupid play, you’re well out of
that.’
It was all right for her. She’d almost won the jumping at the horse show, and she’d saved the stolen dogs and been a heroine. Got almost killed too. If Em got completely killed, then they would pay attention.
We never appreciated her.
She could see the funeral.
    Her father said, ’Thank God, now I shan’t have to go to the school.’
    Michael said, ’Silly old Sonia. Silly old Mrs Creeper.’ He wasn’t even angry with Em for pushing him into the road. ’Em’s like that,’ he said.
    I’m not.
She wrote the whole thing into her play, with a character like Sonia Jenks having the accident, and the heroine, who was her understudy, becoming a star overnight.
    When the play was produced, when she was famous, then they’d all be sorry.

Eight
    Spider Monkey would cost about £5 to repair.
    “I”ll pay,’ Em said, after she and her mother had left the bicycle at Dick Peasly’s garage.
    ‘You needn’t.’
    ‘Let me.’
    ‘All right.’ Mother knew when it was all right to take your money, and when it wasn’t.
    Em had a bit of cash in her bank, which was a hole hollowed out of the plaster behind a torn patch of wallpaper in her room. And she would make bird feeders and sell them as Christmas presents. Miss Etty, in the bungalow built round the tree, had a special way of making cat-proof feeders. Although cats came first with Em and she always sided with them, even after a slaughter, she compensated by making places for the birds to feed in safety.
    Carrie and Michael said they would help, to get Spider Monkey back on the road, so they all went to tea with Miss Etty.
    She gave them lardy cake made of a fatty dough with currants and crystals of sugar. It was the last sort of food she needed, mountainous as she was, but the birds liked it. She always baked things that birds especially liked.
    Perched among the bare branches of the tree that grew slantwise through a corner of her living-room were a moth-eaten old starling that had lived with her for as long as she could remember, some sparrows, and a thrush that was wintering here instead of farther south. On the circular table built round the tree trunk, was a crow that Miss Etty had found with two broken legs. She had kept him propped in a box of dry grass, and though the bones had never mended strongly, he had grown callouses on his elbows, so he could hop or sit on them with his claws in the air. Hisname was Albert and he was clever, like all crows. A scarecrow is fooling itself if it thinks it can fool a crow.
    He could mimic sounds, including the winter wheezing of Miss Etty’s jumbo chest. They say that people get to look like their animals, but Miss Etty wasn’t anything like a bird. She was as big as two people, and always sat on the couch, since she overlapped the chairs. Lester said they had built the bungalow round her as well as the tree, and then had to widen the doorways because she couldn’t get out.
    She wore long skirts made of curtains, so that you could only guess from an occasional glimpse of a massive ankle at the size of her legs. Her round chins were uncountable, and her cushiony hands were short-fingered, like paws.
    But she used them skilfully. When they