The Radleys Read Online Free Page A

Less?”
    Rowan’s anger rises up inside him.
    He wants to say something, but he can’t. He closes his eyes, and what he sees shocks him.
    Toby and Harper, sitting where they are but red and skinned like anatomical drawings showing muscle structure with clutches of their hair stil in place. The image is blinked away. And Rowan does nothing to defend his sister. He just sits there and swal ows back his self-loathing, wondering what Lord Byron would have done.

    Photograph

    It is only a photograph.
    A moment frozen in the past.
    A physical thing she can hold, something from the time before digital cameras, an image she has never dared to scan onto her iMac. “Paris, 1992,” reads the penciled writing on the back. Like she ever needed to put that there. She wishes the photo didn’t even exist and wishes they’d never asked that poor, unknowing passer-by to take the image. But it does exist, and while she knows it is there, she can’t tear it up or burn it or even abstain from seeing it, no matter how hard she tries.
    Because it’s him.
    Her convertor.
    An irresistible smile shining out of a never-forgotten night. And herself, midlaugh, so unrecognizably happy and carefree standing there in Montmartre with a miniskirt and blood-red lips and danger glistening in her young eyes.
    “You mad fool,” she tel s her former self, even as she thinks, I could still look like that if I wanted to, or almost as good. And I could still be that happy.
    Even though the picture has faded from time and the warmth of its hiding place, it stil has the same horrendous, blissful effect.
    “Pul yourself together.”
    She puts it back in the cupboard. Her arm touches the water heater, and she keeps it there. It is hot, but she wishes it was hotter stil . She wishes it was hot enough to scald and give her al the pain she needs to forget his beautiful, long-lost taste.
    She pul s herself together and goes downstairs.
    She watches through the wooden slats of the front window as a garbageman walks up her drive to take their rubbish away. Only he doesn’t. At least not straightaway. He opens up the lid of their bin, rips open one of the black bags, and rummages through it.
    She sees a coworker say something to the man and he shuts the lid, rol s the bin to the lorry.
    It rises, tips, empties.
    The garbageman is looking at the house. He sees her, and his eyes don’t even flicker. He just stays, staring.
    Helen steps back, away from the window, and is relieved a minute later when the lorry huffs its way further down the street.

    Faust

    They study German in a vast old room with a high ceiling, from which hang down eight strip lights. Two of these lights are in a flickering state of limbo between working and not working, which is doing nothing for Rowan’s head.
    He sits there, sunk deep in his chair at the back of the class, listening to Mrs. Sieben read from Goethe’s Faust in her normal dramatic style.
    “ ‘ Welch Schauspiel! ’ ” she says, with her fingers closed together, as if loving the taste of a meal she has made. “ ‘ Aber ach! ein Schauspiel nur! ’ ”
    She looks up from her book to the scattering of blank seventeen-year-old faces.
    “ Schauspiel? Anyone?”
    A play . Rowan knows the word but doesn’t put up his hand, as he never has the courage to voluntarily speak aloud in front of a whole class, especial y one which contains Eve Copeland.
    “Anyone? Anyone?”
    When Mrs. Sieben asks a question, she lifts her nose up, like a mouse sniffing for cheese.
    Today though, she is going hungry.
    “Break up the noun. Schau spiel . Show play. It’s a show. A play. Something on at the theater.
    Goethe was attacking the falseness of the world. ‘What a show! But ach —alas—it is only a show!’
    Goethe liked to say ‘ ach ’ quite a lot,” she says, smiling. “He was Mister Alas.” She surveys the room, ominously, and her eyes meet Rowan’s at just the wrong moment. “Now then, let us have the help of our very own