Rocks in the Belly Read Online Free

doodle. It’s scary how big the world is.
    Then I try to picture how much dirt has fallen if there’s been 34 mm of rain but it makes my brain itchy.
    I’m still in my room when Dad comes home. He sneaks me a yoghurt (strawberry) and an apple (apple) for dinner. Plus he gives me a talking to but is actually kind. He says it’s a bit rich to be stroppy about Robert being up in the business end considering he’s legal in a few months and I’m closer to being a baby than legal and yet still get to ride up front.
    He has a point, except for the baby thing. I ask him to tuck me in and stroke my forehead until I fall asleep.
    He tucks me in and strokes my forehead which always calms me down but he’s never done it all the way until I’ve fallen asleep, my dad. A little bit because he always gets bored, and a little bit because I have to try so hard to fall asleep fast before he gets bored that I never feel too sleepy. Plus he always ends up pretending to pick my nose as a joke and I always get exasperated or flabberghastlied and he just laughs and kisses me goodnight but I beg for one more minute and he gives me thirty seconds.
    This is our routine ritual and doing it after what happened today makes me feel less bruised in my tummy.
    â€˜What time is Robert’s bedtime?’ I say as Dad is leaving but he tells me not to pay so much attention to Robert who is older than me. Then he says ‘Comparisons bear no fruits,’ which is one of his sayings that doesn’t make sense but you can tell it means No.
    â€˜But does he have a set bedtime?’
    He hushes me and comes back and strokes my forehead some more. He smells of boiled carrots and beer. Then he says, slowly, in time with each gentle head stroke he does, without picking my nose at all, he says, ‘You. Are. My. Son.’

3
    There is a short, happy period between waking up, and realising I’m in my childhood bed in my childhood home. My feet hanging over the end of the mattress gives it away.
    I open my eyes and it’s past eleven, another morning almost gone. No messages on my phone and my head still clogged with all the drink I plied myself with last night, sitting in the garden while the old lady snored on the couch.
    Day 3 of my paused life.
    I pad out into the hallway and her bedroom door is open. There’s a little trepidation that she died in the night but her bed’s empty.
    I stay in the shower as long as possible. Then dry myself, dressing slowly in order to postpone downstairs and the woman I’m stuck on my childhood desert island with.
    When I do eventually venture down the washing machine’s going, its powder drawer still open with some undissolved powder in it, most of it, though, is on the floor. A pair of knickers on the tiles that look way too small for her now she’s all blown up on medication and ice-cream.
    The steroids that shrink her cancer also grow her appetite but to me it’s like she needs to eat all the food she would have eaten ifshe weren’t going to die so young. Sixty-two. They lived longer than that in the 1800s.
    I wander into the kitchen, the freezer door open and a puddle in front of it on the floor. There’s an empty ice-cream container on the counter and Mum standing by the sink, gazing out the window, her jaw working on something. She finishes chewing and puts her hand back into the sink, comes up with some titbits and tilts back her head, puts them in, some of it falling onto the floor via her shoulder.
    I move a little closer. ‘Mum, don’t eat that stuff!’
    She turns her head, her fingers out in front of her, all mucky. I clean them off with the tea towel then lift the little metal sieve that catches the gunk from the washing-up and show it to her. ‘Don’t eat this, Mum, it’ll make you ill!’
    She looks at me, swallows, makes a contented noise. I open the fridge — we
are
overdue for a shop. I rest my forehead on