The Line Between Us Read Online Free

trembling and I could see her face was streaming wet. She kept fumbling with the knife and her thumbnail bent right back to the quick, making her sob out loud, but she unsheathed the steel blade, “Give me your hand.”
    I put my hand in my pocket, but she seized my wrist and pulled it out. “Give it,” she said.
    “I’m sorry,” I stuttered, thinking that this was some kind of punishment, that I was to blame for the box and Dad and everything and that if it had been me and not Glyn things would have been different, they’d have been better and she’d have been happy. “I’m sorry Ma –”
    “I don’t ever want you to carry a gun. I don’t ever want you to go for a soldier,” she said and she had hold of my forefinger in one hand and the knife with its glittering blade in the other and she raised it. She raised the knife. “Not you,” she said. “Not again.” She was weeping catastrophic tears.
    “Ma –!”
    The knife went clattering to the ground, the back door slammed and I was left alone. I tucked my hands under my armpits and eyed the blade from a distance as though it was still a danger to me. The world had gone mad and my Ma with it and I was very, very tired because I could see that no amount of embroidered handkerchiefs or wild flowers picked from the lane was going to put this right; that no matter how good I was, I would never be good enough. I leaned my cheek against the door and let the warmth of the wood enter me. I must have fallen asleep because I dreamt that I was standing on my stool by the sink and Ma was feeding my fingers through the mangle and they came out the other side in thick white folds like Mrs Parry’s sheets. Then Delyth walked up the path home from Newport and shook me awake with a crisp comment about some people having to work for a living.
    “Delyth?” I scrambled to my feet, surfacing from my dream to a life that was different from the one I’d known.
    “Is that Dad’s knife?” She stooped and picked it up. “You shouldn’t play with things like that. You could hurt yourself,” she observed, snapping the blade shut. “Where did you get it?”
    “From Ma,” I said. “She gave it to me,” I held out my hand for it.
    “You’re a bit young for a knife.”
    “She said you can have his Bible. She said the penknife was for me,” I answered defiantly. “There was a parcel in the post today.”
    My sister lost some of her teenage hauteur. “Oh.” Her body drooped. She became a smaller size of herself. She handed me the penknife. “Is Ma …?”
    The two of us stood staring up at the door without speaking.
    “She’s …” I hesitated. An account of what had happened was thundering inside me and yet, as circumspect as any grown-up, I spared Delyth the details. “Well, you know,” I slipped Dad’s penknife into my pocket and we knocked tentatively on the door although it was our home and we lived there. We waited for a second and then went inside for our tea.

 
     
    CHAPTER FIVE
     
    I remembered making a universe for myself out of books, to please my Dad to begin with. Get yourself an education, son. I set my sights on the West Monmouth Grammar School as a point of honour and I’d got myself a scholarship before the penny dropped that there was no longer any way of pleasing him, no way of him knowing what I’d achieved; that I’d merely been treating the symptoms of my loss all the while. I learned to love reading, though, for the protection it gave against Ma and Delyth and for the legitimacy it conferred: “I’ll just get to the end of the page,” I’d say, barely surfacing from a realm I’d found where fathers and brothers avoided slaughter, where mothers were not sent half mad with grief, where living happily ever after seemed a proper ambition for a person to have. “I’ll just finish this chapter.” It turned out education was good for all sorts of things – I’d never have known about the French Revolution, about Stephenson’s