Wake Up Happy Every Day Read Online Free Page A

something to see.
    And he shows her where to place the struts and how to fix them in place. And he shows her how to tie the string. It’s simple really, but he explains that you have to get everything in exactly the right place or it won’t fly and, like Daniel says, there’s nothing sadder than a kite that won’t fly. It’s like a dog that won’t bark or a canary that can’t sing. A woman that can’t have a baby. Polly thinks that’s a strange and horrible thing to say. She shakes her head.
    As he works, his hands as clever with his needle and the special plastic string as they were with the box-cutter, Daniel tells Polly the story of his time in India and how he became a kitemaker. He’s told her before several times, but she doesn’t mind. It’s interesting. She likes hearing about what they do in far-away places. Polly has never even lived outside the Anglia TV region.
    He was in India working as an engineer, laying pipelines, away from his family back home in England and he was bored. He was probably lonely too but men never admit to that. Anyway, his manservant – they all had manservants then, even junior engineers like Daniel – took him up into the hills to watch a kite contest. Daniel tells Polly again about all the huge fighting kites swooping and attacking each other while the crowds cheered and hooted. It’s like a football match for the people there. And they’re all gambling of course. Thousands of rupees changing hands on the result of some wrestling match way up in the air. The idea is to control your kite so well that you can cut the strings of your opponent’s and send it sailing off on the wind, or send it crashing to the crowd. Only Daniel says that it’s more vicious than that even.
    ‘See Polly, the idea is actually to castrate your enemy. To catch him, rape him, kill him. And then take money off all his friends.’ He says that to the players that is what it feels like when someone cuts the strings of their kite.
    ‘You mean it’s like having your dangly bits ripped off,’ and Polly laughs that big infectious laugh that all the residents of Sunny Bank love to hear. And Daniel chuckles along too.
    ‘Exactly,’ he says as his chuckle turns into a phlegmy cough. Exactly.
    Polly’s big laugh can be heard in the office of the manager, Irina, even though it’s all the way down the corridor from the library. Irina pauses in her tapping at her keyboard for a minute and half-smiles, and thinks again how lucky they are to have found Polly. And to think she doesn’t even get paid. She volunteers for this. Because Polly is actually here for the good of her own health, not that of the residents. She had a bit of a depression thing last winter after her dad sold the stud farm, and her doctor prescribed being around others less fortunate than herself. Though it is actually quite hard to imagine a depressed Polly.
    At her Sunny Bank interview Polly had said, ‘To be honest I had been hoping for mega-powerful anti-depressants but getting doctors to prescribe actual drugs is pretty difficult these days I find. They really don’t like it. I guess it makes them feel like failures or something.’
    So she’d made Irina smile then too. Irina knows what doctors are like. Oh yes. And everyone agrees that Polly is a tonic for the residents. Even the staff who don’t like her, who find her relentless cheerfulness incomprehensible and annoying, even they admit that she’s good for the old people. Especially the difficult ones like Daniel.
    And so Daniel carries on with his story, and Polly smiles and nods encouragingly and murmurs in the right places and generally gives no sign that she’s heard all this before. About how when Daniel got back from the fighting-kite festival he got his manservant to find a kite-maker that he could apprentice himself to. In the day he’s organising the laying of pipelines – shouting, giving orders, sacking the lazy and the dishonest. Hectoring, cajoling, coaxing