Jesus Wants Me For a Sunbeam Read Online Free Page B

silences.’
    ‘They’ll get used to you.’
    He sat through the weekly coffee and carrot-cake and largely ignored the gossip that soon began to fill the silences. The women might not have been there, he had eyes and ears only for his precious Wol, studying her interactions with other children, protecting her against their viciousness, excusing her own as over-tiredness — and memorising every detail to report back later to Linda. And so within their family geometry a further symmetry, or mirror-reflection, was growing: the father was closer to the daughter, the mother to the son.

3
    Emma’s sore throat seemed trivial at first: another of the shared communal viruses that were swapped back and forth between the toddlers at play-group like counters, or dice, in a board-game. Ben, at school now, also brought home a regular supply of sniffly noses and sore throats to share with her. He had always been the sickly one; missing one or two days a fortnight of school, his alleged ugliness failing to ward off the invisible influence of germs. Emma seemed made of tougher gristle — less complaining, more robust. Rick and Linda paid little attention to her symptoms at first.
    But the swollen glands remained swollen; a blood screen hinted at vague abnormalities.
    Their local doctor — silver-haired, silver-tongued — was reassuring as he studied the print-out.
    ‘I’ve seen numbers like this before,’ he said. ‘No cause for concern. Probably just a virus.’
    ‘Could it be serious?’
    He shook his head: ‘Of course we’ll repeat the test in a week or two. Just to make sure everything is back to normal.’
    Rick and Linda exchanged glances: ‘Then it
could
be serious?’
    He smiled reassuringly, but the smile seemed to lack something: ‘I can’t see any point in worrying about it yet.’
    They worried for a week: in small bursts at first, but lengthening, and growing uncontrollably as the child failed to improve.
    The repeat screen was equally ambiguous. The doctor, while conceding the figures on his print-out ‘might’ not be as normal as he had first thought, still refused to name any disease, or even nominate a shortlist of candidates. He filibustered smoothly for some time before Linda interrupted:
    ‘If it might be something,
what
might it be?’
    ‘It would be premature to say. There are many possibilities.’
    ‘Serious?’
    ‘Some serious, some not so serious. But that applies to any illness …’
    Rick and Linda rose simultaneously, angrily; Rick demanded a copy of both test print-outs which were reluctantly provided. From the receptionist’s phone they made an urgent call, and drove immediately to the rooms of a specialist paediatrician: Eve Harrison, an old school friend of Linda’s. Short, compact, quick-talking, Eve had been known for her frankness at school; she showed no hesitation in applying a label to the blood screens at first glance, a word Rick and Linda had already begun to sense, if only from the glare of its previous absence.
    Like most parents, they had rehearsed over the years for that moment, emotionally: the moment they might hear the word leukaemia spoken to
them,
spoken
at
them. They had read the true stories, had tears jerked from them by films based on real-life events. They had grieved, vicariously, for other children: small strangers who were nevertheless part of the shared public property of parenthood. News of the illnesses of these others — friends of cousins of friends, or cousins of friends of cousins — spread as rapidly as jokes or gossip through a vast network of waiting, eavesdropping parents, in hushed, horrified tones.
    ‘Such
a lovely family.’
    ‘Nothing can be done? Surely
these
days — with all the new drugs …’
    Beneath the horror of such stories there was also, surely, a deeper half-hidden note of relief: that it wasn’t happening to them, and theirs. Perhaps there was even an odd warped gratitude towards the victim, who had somehow — although this