Read Online The Boy in the Olive Grove by Fleur Beale - Free Book Online Page A

didn’t care that it clashed with your hair.’ Her wild hair was white now and she let it hang to her shoulders. It was a proper witch look.
    ‘The thing I remember about that day,’ Iris said, ‘was the immediate hatred I felt for you.’
    ‘I was just a little kid!’
    ‘Yes. For months after Charlie and I got together I tried to work out where the antipathy was coming from. My theory to start with was that I must be picking up your mother’s feelings.’
    ‘It didn’t show. You were always so nice to me.’ I remembered Christmas and birthday presents, Iris letting me help her cook, and me always being wary, never letting her close.
    ‘Over-compensation,’ she said with a wry smile. ‘Anyway, in the end I went and stayed a weekend with a friend of mine in Auckland. She’s a psychologist and I asked her to sort my head out.’
    ‘You on a therapy couch? No way!’ I could imagine her going to a guru of some sort, but not a common garden psychologist.
    She ignored that. ‘I could see that if I didn’t get to the bottom of the hatred it would start to get into Charlie’s and my relationship, and I would have done almost anything to stop that happening.’
    But she hadn’t ever tried to protect me. She hadn’t made Dad stand up to Mum. Easier to focus on that rather than on what I feared was coming.
    ‘I went to Auckland, poured it all out to Gwennie. She put me into a deep relaxation and told me to go back to the first time I felt that I hated you.’
    I held up my hands to stop her, to shut it all out. ‘This is too weird. We’re both insane, that’s all. There’s got to be a pill, an ordinariness pill.’
    She patted my hand, kind of absently, absorbed in her story. ‘After a bit I found I was looking at a scene. I was in it, not as Iris in the twenty-first century, though. I was a young woman and I was working in a garden. It was a herb garden, and my husband was arguing with me and telling me to stop using the herbs. He was a strong man with an air of authority about him. I felt that others looked up to him, that he commanded respect. His wife — that was me — looked up to him too, except that I knew about herbs and the treatment of sickness and he didn’t. People came to me for help. He didn’t like the way they trusted me and relied on me.’
    She paused. ‘I saw another scene, one that terrified me in that life, and I felt that terror again in Gwennie’s house.’
    I couldn’t bear it, but I didn’t try to stop her.
    ‘Men burst into my house. It was night. I called out to my husband but he didn’t come. They mocked me and spat on me. I fought them, kicking, scratching and biting, but there were three of them. They over-powered me and dragged me screaming through the night. I kept thinking that if I screamed loudly enough my husband would come to my aid, that somebody I’d cured would rescue me. Nobody came. Dogs barked, but no person came to help me. They threw me into a stone cellar and bolted the door.’
    I sat hunched over, sitting on my hands so that I couldn’t clap them over my ears. ‘I’m sorry. I’m so sorry.’
    She patted my shoulder. ‘Bess, dear — it’s all in the past. Let it go. We’re different people now. It’s a different age. Have you had enough, or shall I go on?’
    I had to hear it all, even though I knew what was coming. I’d seen it with my own eyes. I said, ‘Finish it. Please.’
    ‘Gwennie told me to go forward to my death in that life.’
    I so did not want to hear this.
    ‘I saw the village square. There was a big woodpile in the middle and all the people I knew, many of them I’d helped — they were all there. When they saw me, their faces filled with hate. They shouted, Burn the witch. Burn the witch. The men dragged me, tied me to the pole in the middle of the woodpile. I looked for my husband. I was sure he would rescue me. I saw him in the crowd. He wasn’t shouting, but he had his arms folded and his face … his expression …