Dreamboat Dad Read Online Free

pattern in but two colours, hardly worn
because it has been saved for special occasions though of ordinary material
and cheap price.
    So why would a husband, on his first day home after more than five
years, be beating his wife black and blue with two children right outside
the door?
    Welcome home, husband. How wonderful to have you back. This is
your daughter. We called her Mata, after your grandmother. And when
this beating is over you'll meet the kid the village call Yank, the reason
why you're doing this to us.
    Welcome home, husband, to your unfaithful wife, your first-born
child. And the child of a soldier just like you.

CHAPTER FIVE
    MUM HAD TOLD ME FOR as long as I remembered: you get used to
anything.
    I told her for just as long, I didn't want to live in the house with a
man who never spoke to me yet smothered my two sisters with love. And
why don't you leave, Mum? You and me can live near town, you can take
Mata and Wiki. We can come and play here on weekends.
    Where will I work? Not many jobs your mother can do, just factory
work and the wages are too low to support a family on my own. Besides,
we just live different lives under the same roof. You should be grateful he
hasn't kicked us out.
    Henry would rise early to get the coal range going, liked the kitchen
to himself to cook breakfast for everyone including me. A big eater in the
mornings, he sometimes roasted a piece of mutton and the family enjoyed
plates of hot meat slices with roast potatoes and slices of white bread.
I didn't eat at the table same time as him and so mornings my mother
separated herself out to eat with me; Henry ate with his two daughters,
later on Manu too when he got old enough. If it was roast mutton we were
allowed to have what we wanted of it but not the knuckle, that was his.
    Pig-headed man of pride against an innocent child — I never stopped
seething inside.
    At nights he arrived late, around eight or nine o'clock, almost always
partly or totally drunk, we became a wider family at the meal table before
he got home. Talked and laughed and joked as a normal family. So not as if
I was isolated out on my lonely little island. But still, it would always hurt.
Mum was wrong, you don't get used to it.
    Every morning Henry would go for a bath up at the row of concrete
tubs. Our house had a bath but we never used it, not when just a few
yards from our house was Falls Bath, named for its waterfall feed from a
larger and hotter pool at a higher level. On weekends, no matter what the
weather, he and the girls would go to the top baths, where most of the
community bathed.
    How I used to envy them, the trio in winter morning dark huddled
under two large umbrellas. I would watch them out the bedroom window
wanting to be with them, feeling my life had been predestined differently
to my sisters'. And I did very much wish Henry would talk to me. Didn't
even have to treat me like a son, just say something normal. Say anything.
A hug wouldn't have gone astray either, must admit.
    Mum said he'd get over it, one day. But he never did. The years
of silence between us just kept rolling by. I learned to keep my own
company, to go into my imagination, discover my musical bent; I tried
out dance steps to music either on the radio or in my head. Dancing
came naturally to me. I could have hours of conversation with myself as
I practised roles and conversational styles, like the women guides, like
different American tourists, adopted the voices and attitudes of older kids.
I lived where Henry could not hurt me with his ignoring: in my head. Or
else in my mother's all-embracing love.
    Mum and I ate breakfast while Henry was at the baths. Mum wasn't a
big eater and she said her people ate far too much.
    In winter the coal range heat drew us to the kitchen. Our sitting
room had an open fire, but if Henry was around then I went elsewhere
in the house. Our bedrooms were freezing. I'd get under the blankets and
lose myself in imagination's landscape and settings.