Read Online Frozen Billy by Anne Fine - Free Book Online Page A

towards the door. ‘If you are wise, you might prefer to keep this news from your uncle.’ She put her arm round my shoulders and drew me near. ‘But you can cheer your brother with the news that, by the end of this week, he will have earned—’
    Lowering her head to mine, she whispered, then stepped back, laughing at the look on my face.
    â€˜ That much?’
    â€˜Yes. That much, Clarrie!’
    I tell you, I ran to the shop on air.

    Mrs Trimble wiped the smile from my face.
    â€˜Late, Clarrie! Late! Don’t think that you’ll be paid for this first hour, since you’ve missed half of it. Now get to work at once. Customers are waiting .’
    But even her scolding and her terse commands couldn’t tether my mind to my duties. All morning I floated in a daze, sliding the heavy rolls of silk back in the wrong places, mislaying samples of elastic, scattering the thimbles.
    By noon, Mrs Trimble had worked herself into such a lather of irritation, she wanted me out of her sight. ‘Clarrie! You’re of so little use today that you can carry these papers down to the Import Officer at the docks. Perhaps the fresh air will rouse you.’
    It was a punishment. She knows I hate it when the sailors grin and whistle, and when the dockmen turn and stare. But she was right. The air was good for me. The cold winds filled my lungs and my head cleared.
    Soon, I was standing on the quayside, watching a great steamship draw near. The old man clinging to the rail beside me shook out his pipe and nodded towards it. ‘That’s the Stirling Castle .’
    â€˜Castle?’
    He saw my baffled look and chuckled. ‘Her name . She’s in from Calais.’
    â€˜Do you know all the boats?’ I asked from politeness.
    â€˜No, no.’ Again he chuckled. ‘But I can read.’ He twisted himself round just enough to wave at a notice board on the harbour wall. Behind a sheet of glass were pinned a dozen sheets of paper.
    â€˜In, out,’ he told me. ‘Sailings. Dockings.’
    When he had shuffled off, I gathered my shawl around me in the icy wind, and went to stare. There, next to the ticket prices, was the list of ships due in and out of dock. Berthings from Singapore and Valparaiso. A sailing bound for Australia on Saturday, on the midnight tide. Another for Tierra del Fuego. If I am honest, I was looking for the name of the ship that I’d waved out of port two years before: the Firm of Purpose . I’d stood, tears burning, waving until my arm could have fallen from its socket, and my father was no more than a speck, and the ship little more than a dot, on the horizon.
    The Customs Officer signalled me back inside his cosy warm office. ‘Here, child. Give these to Mrs Trimble and warn her the next time her paperwork is so awry, she’ll lose her rolls of silk for ever.’
    What? Did he think, as Madame Terrazini does, that I’ve a lion’s heart? I hurried back. Mrs Trimble snatched the import papers, broke open the seal and peered at the official stamp.
    Satisfied, she turned back to me. ‘So, Clarrie, has the sea air cleared your brain of cobwebs?’
    She kept me, to make up the hour I hadn’t been in the shop. The clock was striking seven as I ran up the stairs and stumbled on the mat outside our door, sending it skittering sideways.
    Out from beneath it poked the corner of an envelope. Dropped on the way to a neighbour’s door? Or given to someone else by mistake, then passed back to us? I picked it up to inspect it.
    It was from Mother.
    I ask myself now how, knowing that Uncle Len and my brother were only a foot or two away, hungry for supper, I could have chosen so fast to clatter noisily up the next flight of stairs, to make them think I was only some neighbour passing the door on the way to their own room.
    I think that – just for once – I longed to read the letter first, and by myself. I wanted to be first