The Last Pier Read Online Free Page B

had come upon her at long last. She wanted to wreck the room but she did not, preferring to wreck the space in her head instead.
    Good girl, said an approving voice she had never heard before.
    Her mother coming in just then saw the trickle of blood running down Cecily’s leg and went to fetch a towel.
    Wicked, wicked child, said the voice.
    Cecily’s mother busied herself with this New Development, tears all gone for the moment. Concentrating hard.
    ‘It’s the shock,’ Agnes said answering a question Cecily wasn’t interested in asking.
     
    However, soon after, Cecily felt a weakness had begun to follow Agnes around like a stray dog sniffing at her ankles. A weakness that would force Cecily’s distraught mother to buckle under the weight of public dislike of her entire family. Cecily listened carefully to every word that was being said.
    ‘What possessed her to play such a foolish game?’
    ‘That child has always had a strange kind of imagination!’
    ‘The truth would have come to light anyway.’
    ‘Yes, but she set the ball rolling, didn’t she?’
    ‘She can’t stay here, Agnes, are you mad?’
    ‘She should leave for her own sake, you all should.’
    ‘Agnes, you can’t cope with the child. Not now! Not after such a great loss. And this latest disgrace.’
    So that, perhaps in a desire to satisfy the world in some way with a public gesture, Agnes agreed; Cecily ought to go. But before she let her daughter leave Palmyra House Agnes consulted an expert on child behaviour.
    All the man had were a few rumours and no real understanding of what had happened.
    ‘Send her away to repent,’ he said and Agnes, frowning, asked him why he used the word repent.
    ‘So that God will forgive her,’ the doctor told her.
    He was a Baptist lay preacher on the quiet, doing two jobs, multi-tasking badly.
    ‘She was far too old to be playing that sort of game,’ he said firmly. ‘There’s something evil about such an imagination.’
    ‘Evil?’
    ‘Yes, evil. An innocent girl died, didn’t she?’
    Cecily’s mother hesitated. She was too confused, too upset. Her world had been turned upside down. She made her decision on the advice given. Wondering, through a haze of grief and betrayal, if she were making another mistake. But perhaps Cecily would be better off away from Bly. For a while?
    Out in the countryside the war, phoney though it was, kept everyone busy. The wireless was full of unimaginable news: dark fragments drifting through the September air.
    After severe bombing and shelling Warsaw has been forced too capitulate. It is the first epic event of the war.
    Meanwhile overhead the planes were testing out a loose formation. Practice runs, the papers called it. The noise climbed higher and then vanished above the barrage balloons.
    ‘Just listen to our boys!’
    ‘Prepared to sacrifice their lives for us.’
    Ten thousand ready to die with more to come. Very soon.
    ‘All right,’ Aunt Kitty said grimly. ‘It’s my turn, I can see. I’ll take the little wretch. She’s been nothing but a nuisance since she was born!’
    Aunt Kitty too would do her duty.
     
    On the day Cecily was due to leave the heavens opened. She awoke to find a pair of voices locked in the room inside her head. They had arrived too late for Rose’s funeral, they told her.
    ‘I’m sorry I ignored you,’ Cecily told them.
    The voices grunted. They were here to stay, they said. And they demanded Cecily give them some sort of brief to follow. Cecily was still sleepy and confused, all she could think of was breakfast.
    ‘Do whatever you like,’ she told them.
    ‘Good!’ Agnes said, hearing her voice and coming in. ‘Now that you’re awake, can you help me pack your suitcase?’
    Agnes spoke as if there were concrete slabs strapped to her chest. The voices in Cecily’s head were clamouring for names. How about Coming and Going, thought Cecily, not really caring. And she smiled, startling her mother with the beauty of her