Read Online Rocking Horse Road by Carl Nixon - Free Book Online Page A

incense
and curry (what dairy doesn't these days? But back
then it was an alien scent and off-putting for many
people). A lot of our mothers started doing the whole
week's shopping at the supermarket in New Brighton
Mall so that there was no need to top up at the Ashers'
shop.
    We, on the other hand, became the Ashers' best
customers. Our motivation for shopping at their dairy
wasn't entirely to do with furthering what we now
thought of as our investigation into Lucy's murder.
We genuinely felt that we should help prop up their
business. The spell of hot weather was still unbroken
so, of course, we bought ice creams. We sat around
in Tug's bedroom taking turns with the binoculars
and eating. For a while, we each got through three or
four cones a day. In addition to ice cream we spent
our money on bottles of Coke, Fanta and Mello Yello.
Later we moved on to twenty- and fifty-cent mixtures
until we grew sick of the sight of pink and yellow
Eskimo-men and chewy milk-bottles. As the weeks
passed we also came to loathe coiled liquorice straps.
We left them to lie around Tug's room like the charred
remains of garden snails. We took to tipping bags of
powdered sherbet down the Gardiners' toilet.
    Our mothers were at first surprised, and then
suspicious of the unexplained bottles of milk we began
to bring home on a daily basis. We drank all we could
but there's only so much milk you can stomach. When
we didn't want to answer any more of our mothers'
questions, the milk also got poured away. For weeks
the Gardiners' drains ran white.
    We also bought bread but there's only so much of
that you can eat as well. We Frisbeed whole loaves of
sliced bread, piece by piece, out Tug's window for the
seagulls to catch on the wing. By the end of January
the birds swarmed around the house as thick as flies.
They perched on the edge of the fences and up on the
spouting, just waiting, staining everything with long
white streaks. Eventually Mr Gardiner stormed up
the stairs and laid down the law.
    When we made our purchases, it was always Mrs
Asher who served us. Mrs Asher had never dressed
like someone who worked in a dairy. She habitually
wore fashionable black dresses and skirts and silver
bracelets (what we used to call bangles). Her hair was
long, like Lucy's and with the same sheen, and she
wore it in a ponytail. Mrs Asher dressed as though she
had just stepped out of a business meeting at Tip Top
in order to scoop out our double ice creams.
    We knew that our mothers often used to talk to
each other about Mrs Asher and what they called 'her
pretensions'. Down Rocking Horse Road, being seen
to step outside the carefully pegged-out boundaries of
your life was regarded as something of a sin.
    But grief had diminished Mrs Asher. It had taken
the flesh from her cheeks so that the bones of her face
were thrust forward like scaffolding from beneath her
skin. She had always been slim but Lucy's death had
made coat-hangers of Mrs Asher's shoulders. Her
eyes seemed to float in their sockets as she regarded
us from behind the increasingly dusty glass counter,
beneath which the sweets sat like something in an
abandoned museum. The large front windows were
covered with advertising that was sellotaped to the
inside of the glass. The advertising, for things like
dog roll and pies, let through virtually no sunlight.
It was always a shock to move from the glare of the
hot day into the cool dark shop and it was inevitably
sobering. We tried to be cheery but it was an effort.
More often than not Mrs Asher had forgotten to turn
on the fluorescent lights. The door buzzer would
sound and she would appear from the back, silent and
pale in the gloom, thinner by the day. She would not
speak, not even 'hello' or 'good afternoon', but would
stand patiently behind the counter in the quarter-light
and wait for us to tell her what we wanted. When we
finally made up our minds she would hand it over
without a word and we would pay and leave.
    It's hard to remember exactly what