Read Online Inch Levels by Neil Hegarty - Free Book Online

disturbed too, war being something that – as everyone was beginning to realise – could not be left to the pages of the history books. Still, she must encourage the reading, the interest: she knew her duty. She took Margaret to the library, and waited while her daughter browsed and then took her home again. But the girl must have caught something: something disturbed, like a ploughed field. Certainly this period had not lasted very long; she changed, practically in front of the family’s eyes, into a cautious, measured teenager; she began to hold her classmates at arm’s length; she had fewer friends. She allowed Patrick in, but nobody else.
    Became, in effect – yes: not unlike her mother.
    Well, thought Sarah, apples and trees. Though she tried to reason with herself: children did change, she said, all children change – it was nothing much to worry about. She was unconvinced, unconvincing. She didn’t convince herself and she didn’t convince Martin, who had thought he was at last getting in that tomboy Margaret a model of a daughter to whom he could relate. No chance. ‘Too much baggage in this family,’ he murmured one evening; and she took the point.
    What’s past is past: this was Sarah’s official mantra, even if she herself never had the means of putting it into practice. As an approach, it worked well enough: worked on the surface, worked if nobody asked too many questions. Certainly she never told her children much about her past – and nothing at all of substance. Born in Donegal; little by way of family there; met their father and married him: so much they knew. The barest bird-bones of a life, though enough to withstand a little incurious scrutiny.
    She had too the wherewithal, if necessary, to augment this skeleton with a few facts, some telling details: their marriage in Derry and, more or less straight after, a short honeymoon spent touring Ireland, the unpleasant crossing to Holyhead in the teeth of a late-summer storm; the resulting shocking seasickness; and the grime of the train to London. Later, the dismal first marital home in digs off a decaying Camberwell Grove; the dirt suspended in dull London skies. ‘The smell of gas in the air,’ she told them once, cannily, ‘and feeding the meter on cold nights to keep the place warm.’ Her children looked at their glowing coal fire, looked back at her, wrinkled their noses in distaste at a life they wanted nothing to do with and asked nothing more.
    Later still – by which stage her life was in any case slipping into the realm of the known, the verifiable – the removal from London back to Derry, where Cassie joined her once more. Children did not in any case tend to worry themselves about their parents’ previous life: and Sarah knew this too. Hers was a story threaded with illusion and opacity: like most people’s stories, it served – so long as nobody poked and dug and queried too much. Much better, she had imagined, to remain in a sort of continuing present tense.
    But later, as she watched her children grow – their past and present stretching long shadows into their future, pale sunshine and shadows – she was obliged to recalculate. And now, with Margaret fast approaching adulthood, the painstakingly created structure of Sarah’s own life was beginning minutely to fracture. Could there be repercussions? – for her, other people, for children? She watched her children set off for school in the early morning, their shadows running away from them; she saw them return in their usual state of disintegration, with uniforms and ties askew at the end of a long day. Patrick, she imagined, was fine: he was too young to notice much. But there was Margaret, about to step forward into her future, without having much of a past.
    Sarah fretted: her thoughts clung, unreasoning and indelible. And she was tired: the exhaustion and tension that came from the effort to keep part of one’s identity hidden permanently, permanently in shadow, like