The Other Family Read Online Free Page A

the front-door brass that needed, really, daily polishing. And there would be this eerie silence, a muted quality to all the usual morning noise of slammed front doors and car engines starting and the woman two doors down shouting at her dogs, who liked to start the day with a good bark.
    Margaret got out of bed slowly and felt for her slipperswith her feet. They were good slippers: sheepskin, of enduring construction, as was her padded cotton dressing gown patterned with roses and fastened with covered buttons, and although the sight of herself as she passed the mirror on her bedroom wall caused her to pull a face, she knew she looked appropriate. Appropriate for a professional woman – not yet retired – of sixty-six living in a house in Percy Gardens, Tynemouth, with a double front door and a cat and a large stand of plumed ornamental grasses outside the sitting-room window.
    She opened the curtains and surveyed the mist. It was ragged and uneven, indicating that a rising wind or strengthening sun would disperse it quite quickly. A seagull – an immense seagull – was standing just below her, on the roof of her car, no doubt intending, as seagulls seemed to enjoy doing, to relieve itself copiously down the windscreen. Margaret banged on the window. The seagull adjusted its head to indicate that it had observed her and intended to ignore her. Then it walked stiffly down the length of her car roof, and turned its back.
    Margaret went down the stairs to her kitchen. On the table, wearing much the same expression of insolent indifference as the seagull, sat a huge cat. Scott had brought him home as a tiny, scrawny tabby kitten some eight years before, having rescued him from a group of tormenting children on the North Shields quayside, and he had grown, steadily and inexorably, into a great square striped cat, with disproportionately small ears and a tail as fat as a cushion.
    ‘I don’t particularly like cats,’ Margaret had said to Scott.
    ‘Nor me,’ he said.
    They looked at the kitten. The kitten turned its head away and began to wash. Margaret said, ‘And I don’t like surprises either.’
    ‘Mam,’ Scott said, ‘this’ll stop being a surprise soon. You’ll get used to it.’
    She had. Just as she had got used to a lot of other things, she got used to the kitten. Indeed, she realized how used to the kitten she had become when she found herself explaining to him that one of the main things about life that he should realize was that it consisted of, in fact, getting used to a great many things that were the result of other people’s choices, rather than one’s own. For the first year, the kitten was simply called the kitten. Then, as his bulk and solidity began to take shape as he grew, Scott christened him Dawson, after the comedian.
    Dawson put out a huge paw now, as Margaret passed him on her way to the kettle, and snagged her dressing gown with a deliberate claw.
    ‘In a minute,’ Margaret said.
    Outside the kitchen window, the sea mist had been diluted by having to slide up over the roofs, and the air here merely had a vague bleary look. The little paved yard – a patio, her neighbours preferred to call it – that passed for a back garden simply gave up in this kind of weather. Everything hung damply and dankly, and blackened leaves plastered themselves against surfaces, like flattened slugs. Margaret’s neighbour, on her left-hand side, had been infected by holidays in Spain, and had painted her patio white, inset with mosaic pictures made with chips of coloured glass and mirror, and hung wrought-iron baskets on the walls which were intended to spill avalanches of pink and orange bougainvillea. But bringing abroad back to Tynemouth was not Margaret’s way. Abroad was abroad and the English North was the English North. What was unhappy growing beside the North Sea shouldn’t, in her view, be required to try.
    She made tea for herself, in a teapot, and shook a handfulof dried cat food into a