Read Online The Bones in the Attic by Robert Barnard - Free Book Online

couldn’t afford professionals. He gave the children responsibility for their own possessions, allotting them a tea chest each, and that kept them occupied on the Friday night and on the Saturday of the move. The moving men turned out to be the usual crazy gang, but luckily there was only one interested in football, and he was happy enough with ten minutes’ chat at the beginning and the end of the operation. By five o’clock they were camped in Elderholm and beginning the shift-around of their furniture and their possessions. By Sunday evening the house was beginning to feel like a home.
    Three nights later Matt had a dream that was not quite a dream. It came to him, like most dreams we remember, just before waking. It involved no action, no people, not even any faces. It was in fact nothing but a voice. It was a child’s voice, one his mind must have conjured up from thirty years ago. The voice was just breaking, the voice of a boy edging into adulthood. It was shouting, with the flavor of a jeer strong in it.

    â€œLily Marsden, Lily Marsden,
    Face like a bath bun.”

    A silly, childish rhyme. With the name Lily in it. But Matt knew his mind was increasingly taking him back to the summer of sixty-nine.

They were all on the front lawn of Ashdene, kicking a ball around aimlessly, after they’d all enjoyed a game on the playing fields of the Catholic school.

    â€œLily Marsden, Lily Marsden,
    You’re not a very fast ’un.”

    It was one of the younger boys, not Peter, who had praised his footballing skills the day before.
    â€œThe name is Elizabeth,” said the girl. “Nobody calls me Lily. It’s a horrible name.”
    The words were unwise.
    â€œHorrible name, horrible girl,” muttered Peter, who began dribbling the ball down toward the laburnum at the end of the garden near the road.
    Young Matt looked anxiously at Lily. He had not particularly noticed her in the football game the day before, but he had in the one that had just been wound up—in which she had not played very well. Matt couldn’t think of anything worse than being told you couldn’t play football well, but on reflection he was not sure the rhyme had had anything to do with football. Lily’s face was pudgy, with a small mouth and bright eyes that seemed to look through you, when they looked straight at you. That wasn’t often, however, and then only the quick, sharp glance of someone who was weighing you before looking away again.
    Otherwise she looked at the ground, or at the treetops, and gave the impression of thinking her own thoughts.
    â€œCome on,” said Rory, a boy of about eleven, whose house Ashdene was. “Let’s go and raid the fridge, see what we can find.”
    A house with a fridge was something new for Matt. He knew of shops with refrigerators, but not houses. He trooped behind them through the front door with a pleasurable sense of anticipation. The inside of Ashdene struck him at first as not very different from his own home in Bermondsey, but then he realized that all the rooms were much bigger. The kitchen especially. That was where they all congregated, perching on the table or on the kitchen chairs, watching while Rory opened the fridge and took out big bottles of Coke. The next phase was even more interesting. Rory opened up a special little box in the top of the fridge and drew out a good-sized carton of ice cream. He put it in the middle of the table and fetched them each a spoon from a drawer in the kitchen cabinet. To the young Matt it was as good as being given the freedom of the kitchens at Buckingham Palace. He tucked in, driving his spoon deep in, and slowly eating the strawberry concoction. Heaven! He always liked relishing luxury. He had learned young to space out his pleasures and little treats. All his life he was to eat his vegetables first, before the delights of going on to the meat or fish.
    He was not the only one to be