Slights Read Online Free

know about all those teenagers carefully mowing the front lawn?
      "I'll call the kids' parents if you do it again. I mean it. Leave the poor little mites alone."
      She cried, but she liked to cry. She cried when she made me suckle at her breast.
      After that, I wasn't scared of Harry.
      Eve never tired of my daily visits. She loved to listen to me natter, so I thought up stories on the walk to her place. If I couldn't think of a good story, I told her about a TV show I'd watched, playing all the parts, being descriptive.
      "Who needs a TV with you around?" she said, but she must have been very bored.

    "Yes. I remember her," I said. Peter nodded, as if it was a happy memory we shared. It's hard to connect to that powerlessness. When you're a child, you do as the adults say, unless you're willing to be punished.
      "I didn't talk to her," Peter said. I knew that small rebellion won him a lot. "You're lucky you missed it," he said.
      Lucky I missed my mother's funeral. If that's my luck, I'm in trouble.

    In hospital, the smell of jasmine cheered me. There were flowers from people I'd forgotten or hadn't seen in years. My school teacher Alice Blackburn sent flowers to me in hospital, not to my Mum's dead body. It was frangipani and jasmine from her own garden. The card said, "To remind you of the wonders of life."
      Somehow I knew her card meant the opposite of what it said. We once had a discussion in class, about what a dead body might smell like, because we were reading a series of hard-nosed detective novels, all full of bodies and gore, and wondering about the imagery. She thought dead bodies smelt of frangipani and jasmine.
      The card said, "Call me."
      The police spoke to a lot of people after Mum died, and I had to prove a hundred times that it really was an accident, and one not caused by my imaginary deep-seated hatred of my mother.
      "I didn't hate my mother, I loved my mother."
      "And you didn't deliberately become intoxicated in order to lose your judgement, thus causing the accident?"
      "I wasn't intoxicated. I wasn't even a bit pissy. I only had a couple of drinks."
      "The head waiter at the restaurant where you had your lunch claims you were loud and over-excited."
      "And you find that at odds with my natural character?" I said. Even sitting up in a hospital bed I wasn't scared of them. The cop smiled. I thought he liked me and hoped he'd offer me a lift home when I was well. On the way I'd tell him about Dad and his career, remind him who I was.
      Peter said I was lucky to be Dad's daughter; I got off without a charge. He said if my father hadn't been a cop who died on the job, it would have been manslaughter. He reckoned I was lucky just to lose my licence.
      I think it was because the cop who interviewed me liked me.
      And Mum was a cop's wife, wasn't she? Why didn't they swear to avenge her, if that's why I got off?
      The cops felt sorry for me; they tracked down so many people who said they didn't know me well enough to talk of my feelings for Mum. The cop running it, grey hair, wrinkles, held my hands and stroked me with his thumbs, said, "Isn't there someone who knows you?"
      "Peter," I said. "My brother has to know."
      "We've asked him. He gave us pages about how he felt, nothing about you. What about someone who looks up to you, who might see you as a role model?"
      The only person who'd ever looked up to me was Tim, little Tim who was allowed to be bad when I babysat. And his brother Lee pretended not to care but he did. I'd say he worshipped the air I exhaled.
      "There's a couple of kids I used to babysit. The Walshes."
      Laurie, the young cop, gave me his card and said I should call him if anything came up. I tried to imagine he wanted to see me, that we could drive to a beach cabin which had been in his family for years and listen to the surf. I didn't call him though. Peter put me off, saying how all the cops would know what we