Read Online Past by Tessa Hadley - Free Book Online Page B

something spectacular and greater than themselves, to overwhelm them. The abrupt cutting off of their attention was a surprise to the children, who were used to being bathed in adult awareness, at least for as long as adults were present. If her mother had been there, Ivy might have made a scene – this exposure, when something fell flat which she had longed for and promoted, was famously one of her tipping points. But she couldn’t risk disaster’s crescendo with no one to anchor it against. She brought out the story of cutting her foot on a piece of glass in the pool under the waterfall; reduced to words it seemed truncated and paltry and no one listened.
    Molly and Kasim appeared to have forgotten each other entirely; then Ivy noticed that while Kasim frowned seriously into the pages of his book he was at the same time tickling Molly’s bare midriff with a long piece of grass. He did it so casually that at first Molly didn’t know it was him and brushed the grass seed head away carelessly without opening her eyes. When the tickling persisted – as if the grass had a will of its own, nothing to do with Kasim – a smile of knowing came on Molly’s face and, still without opening her eyes, she snatched at the seed head and held onto it, crushing it. Kasim’s face showed nothing.
    Excluded, Ivy was suddenly shy and wanted to do something childish: she went to paddle in the pool with Arthur. Water babbled in there secretively. A freckled yellow light, refracted in the tea-coloured depths, gilded a scatter of pebbles on the sandy bottom; insects sculled the surface, dodging into the darkness under the ferns. The water was vivid against Ivy’s legs as socks of cold. They were wearing their jelly shoes – it didn’t matter if you got them wet, and you were safe from glass. Arthur was sternly preoccupied in some game with the thermos cup, pouring water out of the pool into a cleft in the rock. Ivy pressed her palms against the soaking moss of the waterfall – until she thought there might be slugs, and pulled her hand away smartly. Then she was seized by the sensation of seeing herself from a far distance, from the skinny tops of the fir trees stirring high above the clearing: miniature, alone inside herself, cut off at the knees by water.
    Kasim picked another stem of grass and dusted its drooping, plumy head, heavy with seeds, against Molly’s cheeks and her closed, protuberant, mauve eyelids. With her hair fallen back from her face, he thought, and from his odd angle, she looked quite different – a sleek water animal basking on a rock.
    â€” What are you doing? she said. — Don’t! It tickles.
    He had forgotten Molly herself, he was so intent upon his explorations – of her ear now, which stood out childishly from her head, its cartilage golden-pink and transparent. Trailing his grass around the whorls of it, he speculated aloud that the grass stem might be sharp enough to pierce its long lobe, then prodded at it.
    Molly squealed in protest and sat up: both of them were shocked, looking one another in the eye again after such intimate contact.
    â€” Why don’t you pierce your ears? Kasim asked severely. — Or your nose, or at least something.
    She explained that she would love to wear earrings but had a horror of the pain of piercing. In fact she couldn’t bear the idea of any pain: she told him this solemnly, with innocent self-importance, as if she were telling him she disliked Marmite or classical music. — I’ve never even had to have a filling at the dentists, thank goodness.
    â€” Ever been stung by a bee or a wasp?
    She shuddered at the idea. — Never. I hate them.
    â€” Broken your arm?
    â€” Nope. I sprained my ankle once, that was bad enough.
    â€” Got a staple in your finger from a staple gun?
    â€” Oh god! She buried her face in her hands. — No! Did you ever do that?
    She believes she’s charmed,