The Beloved Read Online Free Page A

gone. There was a girl in my class called Faith but I didn’t think Grandma meant her.
    â€˜Not who, CP. What. Faith is believing something we can’t see, like faith in God or faith that you’ll walk again.’
    Faith I’d walk again. Dad might have faith I’d walk again but Grandma said I’d never walk on my stick . What if she was right?
    That night I lay in bed hammering my leg. ‘Come on you rotten, horrible leg! Move .’
    Mama hurried in. ‘Bertie! What is it?’
    â€˜Grandma said I’ll never walk on my stick.’
    â€˜Oh, did she? Listen to me, Grandma knows nothing. You’ll walk.’
    â€˜She scared me, Mama.’
    â€˜She scared me too, sugar.’ Mama put her arm around me. I wanted to bury my face in her chest but I didn’t. She didn’t like being mushy. ‘She was an utter . . . She made my life a misery when we lived with her and Grandad.’
    â€˜Why?’
    â€˜Nobody was good enough for your dad, especially not a woman with a career and an accent. She criticised everything I did. I was a hopeless mother, a useless housekeeper and a lousy cook.’
    â€˜What about your macaroni cheese?’
    â€˜Foreign muck. And she was wrong about you not walking, Bertie. You’ll walk. You wait, we’ll spit in her eye! Now, go to sleep, and be kind to that leg. It has a long way to go.’
    Our bathroom was green. Gum-green tiles and eau de nil walls. I sat in the bathtub, squeezing my old yellow rubber duck and making it blow farty bubbles. Mama squatted beside me, pushing my leg through the water. It was hot and I felt dopey, mesmerised by the little waves that slopped up the side of the tub. Mama rubbed soap over my back, a stack of four left-over pieces pressed together – blue Neko, white Lux, pink Lifebuoy and green Palmolive. ‘Give me your palm, Olive,’ Dad would say, and Mama had to say back: ‘Not on your life, boy!’ I gazed at a drop of water gathering in the spout, watched it glisten, grow larger, heavier, and begin to wobble. I lifted my foot to shove a toe in the spout and catch the drop before it fell.
    Mama gasped. I snapped from my daze. Plop ! The drop fell.
    â€˜You moved, Bertie. You moved your foot. Do it again! Do it again!’
    My knee shuddered.
    Mama toppled backwards on the floor, all shades of pink and gold rippling from her outstretched arms like butterfly wings.
    â€˜I did it.’ She lifted her head and smiled at me, a chocolaty smile, and my heart rolled with happiness. ‘ We did it.’ She scrambled up, her dark hair swinging, and took my face in her hands. ‘My beloved child, you’re going to walk. You’re going to walk and everything’s going to be fine.’

Chapter Three
    â€˜But I can’t walk!’
    â€˜Not yet . You will. Hydrotherapy will move it along.’
    Twice a week, now, Grandad came in his car to take Mama and me to the hydrotherapy pool at the hospital. I loved the water; it eased the cramps in my leg and let me pretend I was just like anyone else. I wanted to swim beyond grown-up hands and forget about polio for a while but one little boy made it impossible. Every time we went to the pool he was there, lying in a nurse’s arms, looking at the world with hopeless eyes. His body was scrunched up on one side and his spine curved like a snail. Mama was right, I was lucky. But sometimes I wondered if I was so lucky, how come I had polio at all?
    Grandma came back again to see for herself how I was getting on. She sat on the end of the sofa, huffing like a bull. ‘Where’s this improvement?’
    I put Moose on the floor. I’d been trying to straighten his ear. Mama warned me it wouldn’t work, that it had been stitched on crooked and I should let him be just as he was. I didn’t believe I couldn’t fix him and had sticky-taped his ear to the top of his head for two whole days. But as soon