Read Online Mourning Ruby by Helen Dunmore - Free Book Online Page A

but he gave me a job. He became my employer, paid me a wage, and filled my days with a life I could never have imagined. He believed in my capabilities. He wanted to know where I was and what I was doing. My opinions and my information mattered. He sent me zigzagging on aeroplanes from continent to continent. Once he sent me up in an air balloon because he wanted to find out if such a trip might give pleasure to our guests.
    I told him I was afraid of falling. I told him I was afraid I would jump out if there was only the edge of a basket between me and a hundred-mile map of where I might drop.
    ‘They won’t let you jump,’ Mr Damiano told me. ‘They will have thought of that. I hope they have, because among our guests there will be some with a tendency to fall. We are not fixing up these hotels for superhumans, always remember that.’
    Sometimes, after a long day’s work, we would drink a glass of wine together. Mr Damiano would tell me about his fairground days.
    ‘Everyone who worked for me was an artiste. Did you never see my advertisements?’
    His eyes searched my face seriously. There was a quality of innocence in his vanity which made me want to laugh aloud as I used to laugh when Ruby made a hat from a plastic saucepan out of her toy oven, and danced for me. Mr Damiano’s hair was not yet grey. Sometimes, every six weeks or so, it would begin to seem grey, but then it would blacken again.
    ‘You will have seen my advertisements, Rebecca,’ said Mr Damiano, ‘even if you don’t remember them.’
    He used to hire light aircraft. He sent them flying along the length of summer beaches, then back again, trailing their banners.
    ‘Come to Damiano’s Dreamworld,’ the banners read.
    Yes, I had seen them. Suddenly I was sure I had seen them. I remembered a windy day at Southend, with the sea miles out and my adoptive mother beside me, handing me an egg sandwich. The wind blew. There was grit in my teeth. We sat in a row, my adoptive parents and I, with the car blanket on our knees, a flask of tea, a bottle of Seven-Up for me, and a little packet of Twiglets which I sucked until all the Marmite was off them. I let my saliva wash the twigs into mush. I counted how many seconds each Twiglet took to dissolve.
    They promised that the sea would come back, and then we would swim. They had timed it wrong and I know she was disappointed, after the effort and the long drive, that the sea had shrunk to a pencil line at the horizon.
    ‘It’s all right,’ I said. ‘I didn’t want to swim anyway.’
    ‘Of course you wanted to swim. What else do you come to the seaside for?’ asked my adoptive father.
    The sound of the plane flared in our ears. We alllooked up, rows of families on the broad beach, as the plane swooped low trailing its banner with blue writing on it. Come to Damiano’s Dreamworld , it said. I picked the words out aloud.
    ‘Wherever the hell that may be,’ said my adoptive father. I believed he was big enough to pull the aeroplane out of the sky and crush the glad message in one fist.
    I hear him now. Wherever the hell that may be . Those were his exact words, and they had an elegance of phrasing I don’t associate with him.
    He’s here with his stewed tea and his daughter with her head bowed and the hair sliding across her face. With her right hand, the one he can’t see, she’s secretly burying her egg sandwich.
    He wanted a bouncy girl, a daddy’s girl, a girl who’d race to the door at the scratch of his key and drag him in, hanging on his hand. A rosy, noisy, curly haired caution who would pour out nonsense to make him grin.
    ‘ What did you do at school today, Rebecca? ’
    ‘ Nothing .’
    The plane flies back along the beach. The banner swirls then straightens and I read it aloud for the second time, proud of the way I manage the difficult name.
    Wherever the hell that may be , he whispers to me, one adult to another now. My adoptive father is forty-four, and I am thirty-six. We are