Jesus Wants Me For a Sunbeam Read Online Free Page A

children.
    ‘And as my father read to me,’ she announced over a meal one night, and immediately rose and began tugging books from the shelves before turning to invite Rick to help, or even to agree.
    ‘Where shall we start?’ she wondered aloud.
    ‘Anywhere but Dickens,’ he said, teasing.
    She smiled, and squeezed the calf-bound book she had already selected back into a narrow slot among its fellows, and tugged out a slim paperback.
    ‘I taught that last year,’ he protested.
    ‘Then you can read it to me.’
    ‘I’d prefer something with more meat.’
    ‘You mean more fat,’ she said, but returned the book to the shelf, before selecting something thicker.
    At first there were frequent interruptions. Emma, placid from birth, slept unbroken from early evening to early morning — but her older brother insisted on staying awake with his parents. The television had often kept him tranquillised in the past, now new routines were needed. A war of attrition followed — a war of tears and nerve and bluff — ending in the parents’ capitulation. Weary of running to the child’s bedroom every few minutes, it simply seemed easier to have him with them, playing on the rug in the lounge, late at night. Listening to, or at least hearing, their book-readings also had a soothing, hypnotic effect on the child. His eyes soon drooped shut, his restless twitching ceased — often, oddly, at the end of a chapter, or on the last page of a book, as if cued by some subtle change in the tone of his mother’s voice. Or was it some resolution in the music of the words themselves, words whose meanings were still largely beyond him?
    ‘The
growing good of the world’,
Linda recited,
‘is partly dependant on unhistoric acts; and that things are not so ill with you and me as they might have been, is half-owing to the number who have lived faithfully a hidden life, and rest in unvisited tombs.’
    Rick — if he was still awake — would rise and carry the sleeping boy to bed at the end of such passages; this was the sign for a general lights-out.
    Isolated from the wider world, their small life contracted even more tightly about their children, their family board-games and book-readings. Old friends from University, staff-room colleagues from school — many still single — were rarely seen. There seemed so little time. Linda had chosen to stay at home with Ben for the first year; Rick took leave without pay the following year while she returned to work. The opposite pattern continued with the birth of Emma. Rick spent the year at home, mothering her; Linda went back to school.
    ‘But what of Rick’s career?’ his mother summoned the courage to inquire one evening as she collected their weekly laundry.
    ‘The family is my career, Mum.’
    Linda added: ‘In ten years everyone will share work like this, Mother.’
    The young couple exchanged satisfied smiles behind the older woman’s back. They felt themselves to be pioneers, ahead of their time, and relished their notoriety among less ‘liberated’ friends. That Rick’s mother still did the family’s laundry, and Linda’s mother still bestowed a weekly meal, went unacknowledged. The mothers wanted to help; Rick appreciated the extra time this permitted him to spend with his adored baby daughter. Emma was a small serious child: slow and methodical in her movements, a watcher of games rather than a participant. Her nickname — ‘Wol’ — came from Rick, amused by his daughter’s solemn owl-like appearance, wise beyond her years.
    With Ben at kindergarten now for much of each day, Rick’s life revolved around his daughter: reading stories, reciting rhymes, singing songs, playing games, fingerpainting, visiting local playgrounds and paddling pools — and each Wednesday taking her to the neighbourhood play-group, sole father among a gathering of mildly discomfited mothers.
    ‘It seemed a little … awkward,’ he reported home to Linda after the first. ‘Long