Lifeboat Read Online Free Page B

doesn’t matter if it was just a dream. It is, at least, a starting point. Yesterday you had nothing.’
    I didn’t know this for certain, but it occurred to me that their identities had to be somewhere and that maybe something in their dreams could tempt them out.
    â€˜You said you were with your father, listening to lions roar at bedtime.’
    â€˜Sounds more like a fairytale,’ said she, laughing.
    â€˜But you remember?’ I said, pushing her to recount it quickly; dreams could be lost by just trying to grasp them.
    â€˜Yes, it is all in my head and it seems as clear as a film playing.’
    â€˜Then tell us.’
    With a quick movement, she pulled her knees up to her chest, as a girl would, and pushed her hair from her face. She looked away from me and her eyes lost focus.
    In a storytelling voice she began: ‘Listening to the lions rather than a bedtime story. In the evening as the sun went down, he would come to me, supposedly to supervise my prayers, as my mother insisted that I not be brought up a heathen. I needed to be prepared for when we “went back” she said. I don’t think I wanted to “go back”.
    â€˜My father would stand by my bed and look down through a cloud of pipe smoke, Bible in hand. “Tonight,” he would say, “the reading will be about a lot of saints from Ecclesiastes II.” Or Genesis I or some other such nonsense. And then he’d sit down at my bedside and look at me straight-faced, but with a twinkle in his eye. I would respond accordingly, folding my hands primly as if in prayer. Then he’d say: “But you look like a girl not easily impressed by saints and their doings – I think we need something much scarier for you. Tell me, young lady, are you scared of lions?” And I’d stay quite serious and say: “No, Father, for I have God and a big stick to defend me.” He’d say: “Good girl – never forget that big stick. Let’s have lions and danger rather than saints and fine doings anytime.”
    â€˜Then he’d stride to the window and throw it wide open to the African plains. From the dusty air the sound of lions and hyenas and beasts of all kinds would wend their way in. “Never forget, child,” Father said, “that God is something living and anything else is just the opinions of people we’ve never met.”
    â€˜That was my father’s sermon each Sunday. After which we’d sit quietly in the dark and talk about anything until I fell asleep. My father was a writer; I do not think that there were any other children. We lived in Africa and my mother was very beautiful. He would read me his latest work and I was always dazzled by the worlds he built with words, pouring one on top of another like wet sand on a sand castle. Just for me. I always thought he wrote just for me. Imagine my surprise when one Sunday a woman came to visit us wearing a hat and neat hair, carrying my father’s words all bound up in a book between her gloved hands as if she too owned them. I hated her and dropped the teacup from its wobbling saucer all over her pressed together knees. She laughed and brushed it off. My mother did not and later she and Father argued.
    â€˜From where I’d been sent early to bed I heard talk of school and manners. That night at prayer time my father burst into my room and strode straight to the window. I could tell he was still angry and, as children always do, I thought I was solely responsible. He threw the window open wide and shouted into the night: “Come and get her, come and take my daughter away you wild beasts, she’s not scared!”
    â€˜Then he turned and saw my face. He sat beside me on my bed and let me cry into his shirt, as he stroked my hair and held me tight. “I want you to be brave,” he said, “That’s all I ask. Anything else is rules made up by people we don’t