Carry Me Down Read Online Free Page A

to Miss Collins about my height or my voice. I want to get on; that’s all I want to do.
    We drive down the dip in the road and enter the small and busy town where we shop for my new trousers. When we have finished in the shop, I go to the library around the corner, while my mother goes to the chemist. I borrow a book about lie detection and the librarian helps me to order another book from the Wexford library, which is much bigger. I tell her I’ll pick it up on my way home from school next week.

3
    It is Tuesday, late afternoon and I am sitting on my bed eating a banana and reading a book when her car pulls into the gravel driveway. My granny is home from Dublin.
    I get up from my bed and listen at the door. She is on the front doorstep, talking to Joseph, whose caravan is parked with five others by the side of the road, two miles from here. He must have been waiting for Granny to come back. She gives him some money and he says, ‘Thank you, Mrs Egan. You’re my truest friend. Would you have an apple for Neddy?’
    Neddy is Joseph’s piebald horse, who stares at me and snorts whenever I see him. My granny goes to the kitchen, gets an apple and gives it to Neddy.
    ‘You’re a fine horse,’ she says.
    She closes the front door and I go back to my bed where I listen as she goes to her bedroom and then to the kitchen before she makes her way to me. I wish she would leave me alone. When she comes to my room, I often want to pull a blanket over my head, hoping that I might create a blackout and wake when she’s gone.
    ‘I’m back,’ she says as she barges into my room and looks me up and down with the big, gaping eyes of a deep-sea fish.
    ‘Hello,’ I say.
    ‘Did you miss me?’
    ‘Yes,’ I say. ‘Did you have a good time at the races?’
    ‘Oh, yes. And I saw your Aunty Evelyn in Dublin, too.’
    ‘That’s grand.’
    ‘Will I tell you a story, about a mouse in Gorey? Will I begin it? That’s all that’s in it.’
    I hate this riddle. ‘Go away,’ I want to say, but I can’t. This is her cottage and I prefer living here. When she sits on my bed, and grabs hold of my hand, I don’t stop her.
    We used to live in a two-bedroom flat that had pale green walls and smelt of mould and mouse urine. But when my father lost his job, my mother’s pay wasn’t enough for the rent and so, a few months later, my grandmother invited us to live with her.
    My grandfather owned a jewellery shop and left it to Granny in his will. He died when I was seven and Granny sold the shop and all the jewellery in it. As far as my father is concerned, some of the money from the sale of the jewellery shop should be his.
    ‘Tickle, tickle, tickle,’ she says, as she lunges at me, putting her cold fingers under my right armpit, digging her nails in.
    ‘I know where you’re ticklish,’ she says. ‘I know where! Under there!’
    I thrash and move away. I want her to tickle me but I know it will start out feeling good and end up feeling bad.
    The more I move away, the more she digs under my armpits. We don’t speak and I pretend to laugh, pretend to be enjoying myself, and the silence during these episodes makes them stranger, as though we both know I’m pretending.
    She stops.
    ‘Can I’ve some sweets now?’ I ask.
    ‘Maybe,’ she says. ‘Maybe not.’
    ‘Please?’ I say. Before my grandmother has time to answer, my mother throws the bedroom door open so hard that it hits the wall. Perhaps she didn’t mean it.
    Her face is flushed, down to her neck, and her eyes are wide and blue. She looks nicest when she comes home from working on her puppet shows, and I know that she will never get too old or ugly and will never look like Granny.
    When my mother speaks I look at her mouth which looks like a pretty mouth should. When an ugly person speaks, their lips move like a gash cut into dough covering a dark hole. I often stare at faces to see whether the mouth is pretty and looks like a mouth should, or whether it is ugly and