The Travellers and Other Stories Read Online Free

her neck with dry, hungry kisses. ‘Elizabeth,’ I groaned and pulled her close. One of my knees began to pry its way between her sturdy legs. My fingers fumbled with the tiny buttons at her throat.
    With the force of a falling tree branch she slapped away my hand.
    ‘Snake,’ she hissed in my ear, and stepped off the linoleum.
    Her eyes flashed and her smile was gone and she was straightening the rumpled collar of her dress; she was pulling on her chain mail stockings and shaking the soot from her hair and pinning it up more quickly than I would have thought possible.
    ‘Goat,’ she said, in a hard, quiet voice and pushed the precious cloth across the floor towards me with the edge of her toe.
    ‘I’m sorry Elizabeth,’ I said, humbly, but she ignored me and carried on straightening her clothes as if I had not spoken. Last of all there was the brisk popping sound of her buttoning her boots, and then she looked at me and shook her head and laughed a little and said, how could I ever have thought she would be that easy?

MONDAY DIARY
    MY NAME IS Flipper Harries and I am a gift from God. Neither the midwife nor Dr. Beynon was ready to catch me when I came shooting out like a sleek fish into the hot little room. Through the open door, my sister, Tanya, stared at the creature lying in the kicked-up sheets of our mother’s bed. Green and glistening with a small red face and at its shoulders—Tanya could see—tiny wings, coiled like the ferns on the mountain behind town in springtime.
    Tanya was sent to give the news to our father. She searched through all the dark legs in the Red Cow, but his big shape was lost somewhere in the warm noisy crowd along the bar. The only face she knew belonged to Voyle Peg, alone in a shadowy corner, sprinkling salt on his crisps, the dark blue skin of his face glowing beneath the fluorescent lights. He saw her too and knew that I’d arrived.
    ‘Boy or girl then, Tanya?’ he asked my four year old sister, cupping his hand behind his ear and stooping closer to her face for the answer.
    Tanya, very serious, shook her head. ‘Neither.’
    And then, in a whisper so small he could barely hear it, ‘An angel.’
    She spotted Dad then and went running off to tell him the good news and Voyle Peg was left opening and closing his thin navy lips without making a sound.
    When my mother wouldn’t look at me, Dad sent for the minister, Mr. Morgan, because he didn’t know what else to do.
    Mr. Morgan took me, wrapped like a pupa, like an ordinary baby, from the midwife. ‘Remember, Marion,’ he said to my mother, ‘every baby is a gift from God.’
    When she didn’t move, he put me on the pillow next to her face. ‘This one is too.’
    None of them knew yet that the doctor’s magic pills were to blame for the way I am. (He’d fed them months ago to my sick mother with a cool glass of water and she’d called him a miracle worker ). Nobody knew then, not even Dr. Beynon, that there were other babies being born all over just like me, hands like wings and no arms at all.
    My mother has kept those words of Mr. Morgan’s, like something precious in a box. She has a way of seeing inside me, and at certain moments during the day, she comes over and takes my face in her hands and looks into my eyes and repeats them to me. ‘Remember, David, you are a gift from God.’
    My name is Flipper Harries and I am fifteen years old.
    I’m surprisingly good at rugby, terrible at the piano. At school I’m considered neither stupid nor clever. I’m cleverer than Mr. Clark thinks—he’s forever yelling over the noise, ‘No shouting out. Hands up!’ But he doesn’t mean hands up , he means arms up , and in the forest of limbs he never notices my waggling hand, flapping like a flannel with the answer.
    I’m cleverer than Tom Ellis, and quite often, I do his schoolwork for him. I’ve perfected his handwriting, the tall left-sloping t s and the way his u s are almost closed at the top like an a . I’ve