Being Small Read Online Free

she was a single woman in a large house with more space than she could possibly require. I’m sure she took in us specifically because my mother leaned on that
principle, with all the significant weight that she could muster: a single mother with a part-time job, a boy on the near edge of adolescence, both greatly in need of better quarters than they could afford on the open
market.
    Being entirely unprincipled herself, she’d have done that as a matter of habit. And once we were in, of course she reached for more. The room on the half-landing below our floor, not used except for storage, what a school-room it would make, now that I needed space to that degree. And textiles meant off-cuts, and my mother could do so much with off-cuts, run up bags and belts and little fabric gifts to sell at market, for the money my education so sorely needed...
    ～
    All of that and more and too much more, but I took comfort from it. It took time, she invested time in squeezing poor little Mrs T who thought herself so sharp, so brisk; and surely she wouldn’t waste what was so valuable to her, all that time, for the sake of a few short months in residence? Surely she must be thinking to stay this time, to hold on to what we had, so much better than we’d ever had before.
    Almost, I let myself believe it. Absolutely, I let myself grow lazy, accepting, assuming.
    ～
    Like this:

    “Hi.”
    “Hullo.”
    A boy with a bike, and just the low garden wall between us, that and a world of strange. We knew these conversations, Small and I. We were twelve years old, and we’d been having them all my life.
    “You’ve just moved in.”
    “Last month, yes.”
    “I saw you.”
    He’d been watching, from his end of the street. I couldn’t have known that unless we’d been watching him too, on and off all that month. He looked my age, he had a bike, we were the only boys visible in the immediate neighbourhood. We should gravitate by nature, at least for the little while that it took to learn if we were going to fling apart. I expected that. I was a pessimist by training and by experience; usually it needed only the one conversation. Perhaps I should learn to lie. I was sure my mother would teach me, and back me up where necessary, if the result was that I could buy or borrow or steal a friendship.
    This boy was as cautious as I was, though. It had taken him a fortnight to coast casually past just at the time that I was out there and alone, unmothered, available. He’d had a dozen chances already, and let them all go by. I liked that. So no, no lying. Let it happen, and let it be.
    “What’s your name, then?”
    “Michael. And you’re Adam.”
    “How d’you know that?”
    “It’s painted on your bike.” On the frame, in blue capitals, very uncool.
    “Oh. Yeah. My dad’s idea. It’s got the postcode on the other side. He thinks that’ll stop it being nicked.” Adam thought it was a humiliation, clearly.
    I grunted, with that kind of tempered sympathy that becomes a speciality after a lifetime, even a short lifetime of always being worse off than everyone else. That’s too bad, but starts off as a phrase, becomes a tone of voice, eventually just a cough. “You should see mine. No one would want to nick it.” Certainly no one would want to ride it. Only my mother could ever imagine that anyone might, that I might. We lived in a bubble, yes, but I could still see out.
    “Yeah? So what is it, then?”
    “I don’t think it’s got a name. I don’t think it ever had a name. It’s just a bike.” It had adjectives – generic, geriatric, decrepit, disused – but none that could qualify even as description. I was angling noisily for a dog just then, and that was just my excuse for walking everywhere. See how much walking I do? Of course I need a dog. Truth worked the other way: I wanted the dog to give me the excuse to walk, not to have to ride my bike.
    “Let’s see.”
    Nothing I could do, once he’d asked. I went to fetch the