Read Online Tying Down The Lion by Joanna Campbell - Free Book Online

parents keep their smiles glued on. They have to. It’s a performance and they must keep up the show.
    Mum is stroking the girl’s hand and inching her chair towards her, marvelling at the exquisite nails, tracing her own finger-tip around them. Bwa-Bwa quietens down, surprised.
    “How pretty they are, dear,” Mum says. “Look at mine. A mess!”
    The girl’s eyes never leave Mum’s face.
    “And mine,” I say, picking up Mum’s thread in a kind of human weaving. We present our ordinary nails, comparing them with the flawless set clutching the table. The girl burrows her face into her mother’s apron. Saliva froths onto it. I’m willing Victor to keep quiet.
    “Thank you,” whispers the mother. “You’ve made her happy.”
    Mothers, I realise, are kinder to strangers’ children than their own. When Gillian’s mother arranged for me to win pass-the-parcel at her fifth birthday party because I’d only just recovered from measles, Gillian spent the rest of the afternoon on a mission to steal my dot-to-dot book prize. Her mother eventually found it behind the toilet. But it was no good. Gillian had sat in there joining all the bloody dots with permanent felt-tip.
    The mother shepherds Bwa-Bwa back to their table, where the father cups her face in his hands and presses a kiss on her nose. “Sit by me and eat this peach,” he says. “I’ll pare it for you.”
    She plays with the fuzzy trimmings while he posts peach segments into her mouth. Afterwards he wipes her lips with his blue handkerchief. All this time, the mother eats her own peach in peace. When they walk up the steps to the deck, Bwa-Bwa holds everyone up while she tucks the whole of her dress into her knickers. The smile never leaves the mother’s face.
    “How come we don’t get peaches?” Victor grumbles. At least he doesn’t stare. He just thinks about his own stomach. As usual.
    “I think that family’s got it all sorted down to a fine art, Victor,” Dad says, reaching across and holding Mum’s hand again. “The parents know the girl likes peaches so they packed their own.”
    “Does that mean you’ve brought me a slice of Manor House cake and a cream-soda?” Victor asks.
    Anything would be better than wrestling with the hard butter and flabby slices of toast our waitress calls High Tea. The toast is more like face-flannel, the worn grey kind.
    “What was wrong with that girl?” Victor asks.
    “Nothing,” Mum says.
    “But she can’t talk properly.”
    “No, but her feelings are the same as anyone else’s,” Dad says, folding his toast over a spiral of butter and posting it into his mouth. “Maybe she thinks there’s something wrong with us.”
    Victor thinks about this, but seven-year-old boys have heads like coconuts—ungainly, tufty-haired and weighed down inside with ghastly senseless liquid brains. “She’s as hairy as…”
    “Pipe down, son,” Dad says.
    “But when we went to the zoo, Dad…”
    “Now hold the bus. I’m warning you.”
    “But they’ve gone now, so why does it matter?”
    “Because other people are listening and they’re prejudiced enough,” Dad manages to whisper through his toast.
    Victor looks blank and tries to stab an icy butter curl with T-K’s crampon. The spider panics and falls into the milk just as Mum pours it into her coffee.
    “Something shifted in her brain before she was properly created,” Dad says. “But she’s as human as we are.”
    “Created? Isn’t that what God does?”
    “Well, yes, that’s right, Victor. God created her the same as he created us.” Dad looks pleased with this, certain he’s off the hook now. But Victor is still dangling bait.
    “She’s not the same as us though, is she, Dad? I think her Mum’s egg must have gone off.”
    Dad has no idea how many facts circulate in the junior playground in these enlightened days. He almost chokes on his crust. Not that it’s actually crusty. It’s as soggy as bread left out in the rain on a