Frankie and Stankie Read Online Free

start knocking her about. Everything about poor Rosema’s body language is screaming at them to abuse her. They barge in and kick her round the garden like a football. They toss her high into the tallest trees so that she hangs for a moment in the branches by her hair before falling on to the red earth in a heap, like a broken spider. Then, one day, a boy called Donald Carter gets into a frenzy. Dinah watches as he shakes Rosema violently between his teeth, tossing his head from side to side. Then he throws her into the air and catches her inhis mouth. He growls at her like a tiger and suddenly he’s ripped off the end of her nose. Dinah’s eyes are opened. In a fit of guilt she takes Rosema to her heart and swears to love her best for ever. Having rejected her child, she now adores her with an extreme devotion. She sews up Rosema’s nose with a needle and some of the flesh-coloured thread that her mother uses to cobble together holes in silk stockings.
    â€˜Rosema is my favourite,’ she says. ‘Rosema is my best doll.’
    She and Rosema become inseparable.
    The reason Dinah can sew from an early age is that her mother can’t. Sewing follows the law of alternating generations, so that if your mum can’t sew then you can. Dinah’s mum’s idea of sock-darning is to work a tacking thread round the hole and pull it tight into a ruched lump. This is one reason why Dinah and Lisa have blisters on their heels. The other is that their shoes are much too clumpy. Their dad, who is independent-minded and holds strong opinions on most things, has grown up in a household without sisters. He thinks girls’ stuff is silly and inferior and he’s got no time for it. He buys his daughters boys’ toys and boys’ shoes, so they have a red-and-green Meccano set and Bayco building blocks and a Hornby and several gyroscopes, and sturdy laced shoes called Knockabouts. But when Dinah is six, precisely because she’s so skinny and weedy, a shoe-shop attendant measures her as AA width, and says that her feet will be ruined unless her parents put her in ultra-narrow, girly Startrites which just happen to come with a T-bar and a buckle and petal patterns cut out on the insteps. This is the happiest day of Dinah’s life and poor Lisa is terribly jealous.
    Dinah is a cry-baby and she has a bleeding heart. So one day she won’t stop crying because she’s accidentally washed a small spider down the plug-hole. Her mum, who has a Gothic streak, tells her that much more terrible things are happening every day. There and then she tells Dinah about a court case in that day’s newspaper. It’s all about a mother who’s been tying up her children and making them eat their own sick. Because Dinah’s mum is anxiety-prone, she likes to off-load gruesome stories. This is why she tells Lisa and Dinah about the multiple rapist in Cape Town for whom she mistook the Australian soldier. He could get through any locks and keys, she says. So the rapist would get into a house or a flat while the woman who lived there was out, and then he’d hide, sothat when the woman came home, she’d lock the door safely behind her and, just then, the rapist would step out of a cupboard.
    This anecdote makes Dinah start checking all cupboards on entering a house, including small flat wall cupboards. And she always looks under beds, chests and dressers in case of very small rapists – sometimes even two-dimensional rapists. Only then will she think of locking a front door. Dinah’s mum calls the rapist a murderer, so that she doesn’t have to explain what rape is, because Dinah and Lisa don’t yet know anything about sex, not until they are nearly ten and eleven. This is when Dorothy who lives in Manning Road takes them into a cupboard and whispers to them one by one what their mum and dad do together in bed.
    When their dad gets a proper tenured lectureship in the maths