The Crocodile Bird Read Online Free

didn’t know where I was. I’ve never been to sleep anywhere but in the gatehouse.”
    “You’re kidding,” he said.
    “No, why would I? I’ve never slept away from home.” She marveled at it. “This is my home now.”
    “You’re the greatest,” he said. “I’m lucky to have you, don’t think I don’t know it. I never thought you’d come, I thought, she’ll never come and stay and be with me, she’ll go and I’ll lose her. Don’t laugh, I know I’m a fool.”
    “I wouldn’t laugh, Sean. I love you. Do you love me?”
    “You know I do.”
    “Say it, then.”
    “I love you. There, is that okay? Haven’t I proved I love you? I’d like to prove it all the time. Let me come in there with you, love, let’s do it again, shall we? D’you know what I’d like best? To do it to you all the time, we wouldn’t eat or sleep or watch TV or any of those things, we’d just do it forever and ever till we died. Wouldn’t that be a lovely death?”
    For answer she jumped up, eluding his grasp, and shifted to the far corner of the bed. He had laid her clothes there, the garments shaken and carefully placed side by side, like Eve might. Quickly she pushed her legs into the tracksuit, pulled the top over her head.
    She said gravely, “I don’t want to die. Not that way or any other.” A thought came that she had never considered before. “You wouldn’t ever do it to me without me wanting it, would you, Sean?”
    He was angry for a moment. “Why d’you say things like that? Why did you ask me that? I don’t understand you sometimes.”
    “Never mind. It was just an idea. Don’t you ever have nasty ideas?”
    He shrugged, the light and the desire gone out of his face. “I’m going to make us a cup of tea. Or d’you fancy a Coke? I’ve got Coke and that’s about all I have got. I haven’t got nothing to eat, we shall have to go down to the shop.”
    Anything, she thought. I haven’t got anything to eat. She wouldn’t tell him this time. “Sean,” she said, up in the corner, her back to the wall. “Sean, we’ll have to go. I mean, leave here. We ought to put a good many miles between us and her.”
    “Your mum?”
    “Why do you think the police came? I told you they came.” As she spoke she knew he hadn’t thought, he hadn’t listened. Probably he hadn’t heard her say that about the police. He had been consumed by desire, mad for her, closed to everything else. She knew how that felt, to be nothing but a deaf, blind, senseless thing, swollen and thick with it, breathless and faint. “I told you the police came.”
    “Did you? I don’t know. What did they come for?”
    “Can I have that Coke?” She hesitated and made the hesitation long. “I’m supposed to have gone to her friend Heather. That’s where she thought she’d sent me. But I came to you.”
    “Tell me what she’s done.”
    His expression was a bit incredulous and a bit—well, indulgent, she thought the word was. He was going to get a surprise. It wasn’t going to be what he thought—she searched her imagination—stealing something or doing things against the law with money. He sat down where he had sat before and became intent on her. That pleased her, his total absorption.
    “She killed someone,” she said. “The day before yesterday. That’s why they came and took her away and I’m afraid they’ll want me, they’ll want me to be a witness or something. They’ll want to ask me questions and then maybe they’ll try to put me somewhere to have people look after me. I’ve heard about that. I’m so young, I won’t be seventeen till January.”
    She had been wrong about his absorption. He hadn’t been listening. Again he hadn’t heard her, but for a different reason. He was staring at her with his mouth slightly open. As she noted this he curled his upper lip as people do when confronted by a horror.
    “What did you say?”
    “About what? My age? Being a witness?”
    He hesitated, seemed to swallow.