Something Special, Something Rare Read Online Free

it was possible that she was no longer an only child. It occurred to her that she could have younger brothers and sisters who lived in the area, who maybe even went to her own school – children that her mother had decided to keep instead of giving away to strangers.
    This possibility caused her to study local families even closer. Each afternoon, she scrutinised every fair-haired mother who picked up her kids from school. There was a cheery woman in her early thirties who wore sequined gypsy skirts and red boots, who collected her five-year-old son on a bicycle that had a second seat on the back. One day, Ginger found herself running towards her, stopping just short of the bike’s front wheel. ‘What’s your name?’ she blurted out, dropping her school case. Her son suddenly appeared and the woman put one arm around him and kissed him on the head. ‘Caroline,’ she replied. ‘What’s yours?’
    *
    There was also a very young, thin woman whose twin boy and girl never wore a uniform to school; every afternoon, she would stand at the gate, smiling, and holding two cones of strawberry ice-cream. Ginger didn’t bother to ask what her name was: she wore a silver necklace with letters hanging from it that spelled out ‘KAREN.’ And then there was a glamorous woman – quite a bit older – who wore her blonde hair pinned up into a lacquered beehive, and who picked up her first-grade daughter in a dark-blue convertible that she always double-parked. One afternoon, Ginger summoned the courage to ask the woman her name. But the woman merely looked away and pushed a button on the dashboard. The roof of the car began to rise, enclosing the woman, and she began to wind her window up. Her daughter climbed into the car and they drove away.
    After a few months, this imaginary life – this pretend mother – no longer preoccupied her, and she began to resent the conventional families she witnessed each day, with their ice-creams, bicycles and easy laughter. She dreaded the usual questions from the kids at school: What does your dad do? How many brothers and sisters have you got? What’s your mum baking for the annual fete? Often her reply was silence, or she disappeared into the toilet block.
    She decided that not one of the mothers she saw at the school gate would have given her baby away. The love and tenderness they exuded was too obvious.
    *
    By her tenth birthday she’d realised that the dead were much easier to get to know than those who were still alive. In calloused hands she recognised a hard life spent labouring; in dark, leathery faces, permanently suntanned, she sensed years whiled away on a fishing boat; caesarean scars revealed the births of offspring; a thin and hairless body told stories of incurable cancer.
    Ginger also grew to understand that you could learn a lot about a corpse from the kinds of mourners it attracted. For example, a few scruffy men with beards and oversized shoes usually meant that the deceased had been homeless and had probably died in a nearby lane. It was on these occasions that her father usually performed the ceremony alone, delivering a short, general eulogy, in lieu of the usual family members and friends.
    Women in black suits and pearls, with matching handbags and shoes, usually mourned a corpse that had acquired some wealth, one who had lived in Double Bay or Vaucluse – probably a former socialite or the mistress of a CEO who’d died of leaking breast implants or too many sessions at a tanning salon.
    One day, the parlour was packed with over 200 people – some with dreadlocks, others with shaved heads, teenagers with tattooed arms and hands. The air, she remembered, had been thick with the smell of incense. She’d even noticed a handcuffed female prisoner wearing an orange jumpsuit, flanked by two male guards, sitting in the back row, and a huge grey dog the size of a Shetland pony panting away beside the