How the Light Gets In Read Online Free

doctors.
    ‘Me too,’ I say. ‘I desperately want to be a doctor. Reconstructive plastic surgery and other –’
    ‘Oh, like faces and – ’
    ‘No,’ I say. ‘Definitely not facelifts. Hand transplants, that kind of thing.’
    ‘That’s so great,’ she says. ‘I think the three of you will get along just great.’
    She tells me what ‘the kids’ are studying and what sports they play. She tells me so many things it feels like every new fact is pushing an old one out of my brain. But I try hard to concentrate. I want to remember the details. Only selfish people don’t listen to other people’s details and the most selfish of all people never ask any questions. Like my sisters. They don’t even ever ask anybody how they are. They just launch into puerile conversation about the sales on at the shops, or the way certain stockings ride up your arse.
    When we are standing under the tree house in the enormous garden I say, ‘This is the poshest house I’ve ever set foot in. You must be so rich.’
    Margaret stops and grips my hand.
    ‘I know this is a different world for you,’ she says, ‘but I don’t want you to compare us to your family.’
    ‘But this is like a castle compared …’
    Margaret hugs me, without warning, holds me tight and pats my back, then lets go and looks right at me. Just like Flo Bapes, it’s as though she is hoping I will cry.
    ‘No comparing,’ she says. ‘Now, let’s go to your room.’
    ‘Great,’ I say. ‘I’m so tired.’
        
    Alone at last. I draw the curtains, kick off my shoes and lie on the single bed with its chalk-white quilt. There’s a breeze circling my bare feet and I’m desperate for sleep. But within minutes of closing my eyes, my brain springs open, like a flick-knife. It has been nine days since I slept for more than four or five hours. Although I’ve had insomnia for a long time, it has never been as bad as in these past few months. Every morning I wake just seconds before the birds do, as though my sudden waking is what causes them to start their chirping. Then I lie there, a dead weight, listening to the birds and hating them.
    I open my suitcase, get the thesaurus out and look up synonyms. At the start of the year I made a promise that I would learn two new words every day, and so I lie on my back and say them over and over again: soupy, juicy, sappy, starchy, marshy, silty, lumpy, ropy, curdled, clotted, gelatinous, pulpy, viscid, grumous, gummy, clammy, sticky, treacly, gluey and glairy. I think, I am counting slime instead of sheep and this makes me smile, but I would rather sleep.
    I am about to get down on my knees and pray for sleep when my host-brother and sister arrive home. I hear them coming up the stairs and their quick footsteps on the floorboards on the landing.
    Margaret calls out, ‘Louise, are you awake?’
    I sit up. ‘Come in,’ I say, as though I am the important occupier of a big office.
    I stand up when my host-sister and host-brother walk into the small white room. I have learned that this is what you should do when in somebody else’s home. Margaret stands in the doorway with her arms around the shoulders of her children.
    ‘Louise, this is Bridget and James.’
    ‘Pleased to meet you,’ I say, and shake hands with both of them, wishing I’d had time to re-talc my palms.
    James’ hand is dry and strangely small and soft; a hand-shaped cushion.
    Margaret squeezes her children close to her side but they break away and come into the room. I sit on the pillows with my back to the wall.
    ‘You look different in your photos,’ says Bridget, looking smack into my eyes the way her mother does. I must have looked like a gargoyle in my photographs.
    ‘Do I?’
    Bridget is thirteen, but looks older. She is taller than both her brother and her mother. She sits on my bed and crosses her long, bare, brown legs then pulls them in to her chest, as though she has no joints. I cannot stop looking at her legs and her clean