Something Invisible Read Online Free Page B

mother, “‘And when his golden walk is done—/ Sits shyly at his feet.’”
    â€œThat’s good, Mum,” said Jake. “Especially ‘follows soft the Sun’. And ‘golden walk.’ That’s a day, I suppose. Like the American Indians; they believe the sun walks across the sky, from sunrise to sunset.”
    â€œOf course it’s good,” said his mother glumly, banging her head with the palm of her hand. “Because I didn’t write it. That’s Emily Dickinson. And before you ask, yes, she’s famous; yes, she’s dead; no, she’s American; but no, she’s not an Indian. How amazing, though, about the sun walking across the sky. You know the maddest stuff, Jake.”
    Jake smirked, self-satisfied.
    â€œOr she might be Chinese,” he said, “you know, because of the word for ‘sun’ being the same as the word for ‘day’ in Chinese. Did you know that?”
    â€œYou’re a rare one,” his mother said with a laugh, and ruffled Jake’s hair. “But she’s not Chinese.”
    â€œDon’t,” Jake said, pushing her hand away and smoothing down his hair again. He didn’t like having tossed hair.
    His mother stood up from her desk in her red silk kimono and stretched her arms over her head. The baby cried.
    â€œDrat,” said his mother—not “brat” as Jake, for one wonderful, awful moment, had thought—and scratched her head. She yawned, catlike, and drifted out of the room in the direction of the cries.

CHAPTER
    15
    Jake found himself walking past number ten, Mount Gregor Park, so often over the next few days that he had to admit it wasn’t just by chance. For a start, it was a cul-de-sac, which meant it wasn’t on the way to anywhere. Something was drawing him. Stella never appeared, though, so if he was going to talk to her—and it seemed to him, when he thought it over, that he must want to talk to her—he was going to have to ring the doorbell.
    He stood on the pavement and thought about ringing the doorbell, and what would happen when he did, and who might answer.
    In the end, he decided he would just give it a go. But it didn’t work. At least, he couldn’t hear it, though maybe it rang somewhere deep in the house. Anyway, no one came, so he picked up the snarling lion’s head knocker and let it fall heavily against the door.
    Almost immediately Stella was there, framed in the doorway.
    â€œOh, it’s you,” she said, neither surprised nor displeased, it seemed, to see him. “Come in.”
    Jake had been rehearsing things to say, such as, “Would you like to come and play football in the park?” or “I was just passing and I thought…” But he didn’t say any of the lame things he’d been practicing. He didn’t need to. It was as if she’d been expecting him. Anyway, she didn’t seem to wonder why he had knocked.
    She was right about the house being bigger than it looked. Much bigger. It went on and on, room opening out of room, till you got to the kitchen at the very back, off which was a room called the back kitchen, where they kept Wellingtons and garden implements and a vegetable rack full of onions with long browny-green leafy bits, like leeks, and a sack half full of potatoes, and a basket for the dog. They didn’t have a dog, just a dog basket. Nobody explained why. Maybe one of the younger ones slept in it, Jake thought, and giggled quietly at his own hilarity.
    When you went through the back kitchen, which smelled unpleasantly of onions and rubber, and out into the garden, it went on and on too. You couldn’t call it a yard, exactly, because there were quite a lot of things growing in it, like apple trees and grass and cabbages, but there were also a lot of things that didn’t belong in a garden—a pram with one wheel missing, several window frames and a rusty washing