Freedom Island Read Online Free Page B

unintentional, for he was not a clown—particularly at home, where he ruled the house with an iron fist. His wife, Angie, and his fresh-faced daughter Lucy, were careful to give him a clear berth. Lucy, seventeen, was a carbon copy of her mother: both pale, lightly freckled, with an unusually delicate frame and a mass of bouncing red hair in gravity-defying curls, although mother’s was now flecked with grey. Every day, Gonville would come home from his work as a hospital orderly and drop heavily onto the same squeaky kitchen chair, awaiting his supper in indignant silence. And Angie would serve it, promptly, every day. Until today.
              ‘Angie!’ he boomed, for his voice was as difficult to moderate as his body.
              She stared motionless, leaning exhaustedly on the table with one hand, the steaming pot shaking in the other.
              ‘Angie?’ now with confusion, and a split second later Angie’s hand slipped from the table-edge, dropping suddenly her head hit the table corner, and she was never to stand again.
              At least that was father’s story, wondered Lucy. She’d overheard the whole thing. She had heard them quarrelling, and father had been drinking more than ever. The doctor instantly divined a weak heart followed by accidental death, but then Doctor Zadir was father’s best friend—from the hospital. And as the extended family—half the village—trailed into the rainy church graveyard for the burial, it dawned on Lucy that she would now become the one expected to deliver father’s supper on time, every day, day-in day-out: she would be the one to clean, to repair his clothes, to get the shopping and to feed the chickens, as how could she leave her father uncared-for?
              A week later, her father returned home from the hospital as usual. He’d had a bad day, clearly: he was grumpy and dark, not greeting her as he burst in and sat down. Lucy knew to keep her month shut, and she placed a bowl of vegetable soup before him. He stared, breathing through his nostrils amid the rising steam, stooping forward. Almost invisibly, for it happened that fast, he flicked his hand upward sending the bowl and soup flying across the kitchen, smashing against the wall. Lucy froze.
              ‘I work eight hours in that miserable place and all I get is vegetable soup?’
              ‘We had no money . . . I found the vegetables.’ But he was not interested. Standing slowly he swung his arm so naturally she did nothing to avoid it. The back of his meaty hand gave her an almighty whack across the cheek. To him, it may have been a light slap, perhaps, but it knocked Lucy off her feet and she lay sprawled on the floor, her eyes welling and her cheek glowing and throbbing, her lip quivering, —trying not to cry for fear of antagonising him further.
              The days crawled by, with the dark days broken by the angry or violent ones, until Lucy could take no more. Why? she asked herself finally, should she sacrifice her own life in the service of someone so ungrateful?
              She would slip off to the toilet just to be free of him for a few beautiful minutes, to be alone with her thoughts and away from those probing eyes: analytical, questioning, patronising, scrutinising, desperate, pathetic, prying, expectant, wistful, conniving, looking up and to the right blinking twitching finger tapping head leaning legs crossing heavy breathing. Why couldn’t he just let her be? Or she’d find herself lying in her bed or in the bath—terrified that the unlock-able doors might creak open.
              One night, her father had his friends around to play cards. From her bed she could hear them, banging the chips onto the kitchen table, laughing coarsely, yelling: her father betting away the same money he expected her to feed him