The Girl from Station X Read Online Free

window. When I am ill with a high temperature, my mother takes me to sleep with her in the bedroom she shares with my
father. She wakes me during the night to give me brown medicine in a spoon, then describes the fairies she can see out of the window, like little balls of coloured light. I believe her, though
I’d imagined fairies as little people. To test whether they exist, when I’m better, I leave a tiny blue flower in a special place on the lawn. Next morning, it has gone. The fairies
took it. They do exist. My mother was right.
    My mother and I – all of us – are happy at North Heath. Before I go to sleep, she reads to me from a book called
The Merry Meadow
, about a grasshopper, a rabbit and a
harvest mouse who live in a meadow full of flowers, where there is always sunshine.
    We are moving soon, to live near our grandmother.
    ‘Does our new house have a merry meadow?’ I ask my mother.
    ‘Yes, it does,’ she replies, with certainty.
    How I love my mother then! I associate her with the sea, because of her vivid blue eyes, her star sign, Cancer the Crab (the astrological sign associated with motherhood), and because one of the
places where she is happiest is Hope Cove, a fishing village in Devon where we now go most summers.
    In Hope Cove’s village is a little square with white thatched cottages, framed with hydrangeas, white, pink and blue. Across the road, below our house, is the beach, sandy and safe at low
tide, then at high tide the sea splashing up and licking at the sea wall. The rocks under that wall form ‘my house’ – the smooth pink one the bathroom, the dark grey jagged one
the dining room, the light grey smooth one the bedroom. Raymond and I play with our buckets and spades on the sand and in the rock pools. Raymond’s bathing pants are white with red crabs on
them. My mother insists that we wear sun hats. Raymond points at me: ‘You look like a baby in that hat!’
    At Hope Cove, my mother is often in a white cotton skirt and top with a pattern of little figures dancing; I remember her in that outfit in Spain. On the beach, she wears a blue bathing suit
with a skirt. She puts on a cap covered with yellow daisies and swims far out, to the rock that only appears at low tide, where you sometimes see a puffin. How brave my mother is! As a child, she
boasts, she could climb the rocks with bare feet, outdoing the fishermen’s sons. She wants us to be as courageous as she was and I want to please her.
    My mother knows about the tides and how they affect her prawning. She wades out to the rocks at the far side of the beach carrying her heavy fishing net and waits patiently for the low tide to
turn. Later she returns to the house with a pale cotton bag slung round her neck, full of live prawns; she doesn’t think this cruel. One summer, like a boy, she throws a bucket of water at a
cat that has got into the garden at Hope, and when we’re back home at North Heath, she encourages Raymond to laugh with her at the newsreader on our new television. They close the TV shutters
while he’s still speaking, my mother saying to Raymond: ‘Isn’t he hideous?’ I know that the man on the television can’t see us, but her nastiness – and that
business with the cat – cut me to the quick.
    From when I was a very small child, I loved my grandmother’s house, Knowle. I loved the round dark pink soaps in my grandmother’s bathrooms, smelling of carnation.
I loved her terrapin, Okie, named after Lake Okeechobee in Florida, where he came from – my mother and grandmother brought him over on a ship, where, with two baby alligators, he travelled in
a bath. I loved my grandmother’s white Chinese pheasant, which followed me up and down inside his huge cage while I ran to and fro outside. I loved her garden with its row of white rose trees
she called ‘The Bridesmaids’, her big greenhouse with its rich scents and damp heat in winter, her banana tree that she wrapped up in straw when it