Black Rabbit Hall Read Online Free Page B

centuries but when you leave it feels like the entire holiday happened in one afternoon. Maybe that’s why nobody cares that the clocks are all set wrong.
    Not much ever happens.
    Books help the time pass. But I have left my novel beside my bed and can’t be bothered to climb all the stairs to the turret. Instead I press my toes against the armrest and steer my mind into the exquisite torture that is thinking about the birthday party I missed: Fred mostly. Thinking of him fills my body with a curious sweet heat. It comes out in a long sigh that sounds like something from the cinema, not mine at all.
    Toby looks up instantly, eyeing me sharply through the spikes of his fiery lashes as if he knows exactly what I’m thinking about. Annoyingly, I blush, confirming his suspicions.
    Toby and I were born fifteen minutes apart. I came first. Toby had the cord around his neck and Daddy almost lost his male heir that day. We’re from two separate eggs, not connected beyond being siblings and sharing Momma’s womb, yet sometimes weird things happen: things that aren’t meant to happen to non-identical twins. Like when he smashed his nose crashing off the tree rope swing lastyear, I got a nose bleed for no reason. If I wake up unexpectedly in the night, I’ll often get up and discover he’s just woken too. Sometimes we even dream the same dream, which brings with it the mortifying possibility that he will dream about kissing Fred. We laugh at the same things, ‘Dumb-rabbit stupid things,’ as Toby always says – this is in itself a joke but I don’t know why it’s funny. He doesn’t have to say much to make me laugh. It’s the way he can hitch just the tiniest muscle in his face, or fill a silent pause with an unspoken rude word. He takes things too far. Always. It’s my job to pull him back. But if I wasn’t here I don’t think he’d do it in the first place. He falls, knowing I’ll catch him. Sometimes literally. He’s usually covered with bruises. We both hate liquorice.
    For most of our lives Toby and I have been at the same height, same stage, so that we’ve met each other eye to eye, our feet the same distance from the wooden end of the bed when he flumps next to me in the morning, chatting away while I’m trying to read. But I’m now one inch taller. I have two breasts with sore nipples hard as boiled sweets (still hopelessly minuscule, compared to Matilda’s, but showing promise). On 22 January – identified at 3.05 p.m. in the girls’ toilet – a sticky brown smear had appeared on my underwear, something that Momma later confirmed was the quietly triumphant arrival of the Curse. But Toby at fourteen is still the Toby that was: wiry, fiery-haired, ‘weirdly beautiful for a boy’, Matilda once said, denying it afterwards. His voice has gone crackly, a bit like the radio signal, and his shoulders wider, but we no longer look the same age. We no longer look much like twins either, apart from the hair. I don’t think he likes that very much.
    Toby starts to pick the moss from between the grey stones of the balustrade, roll it into hairy green balls and flick it off the ledge with his forefinger and thumb, seeing how far the balls will jump. We can kill hours like this at Black Rabbit Hall. We have to.
    ‘Here, hold this for me, would you, darling?’ Momma calls to me, brown elastic hairband dangling between her teeth. She waves some yellow ribbon above her head. Her hand – ‘cured by Cornwall!’ – is free of its splint now. ‘Seawater just makes the most terrible tangles. Have you seen the state of your little sister’s hair?’
    I walk over to Momma, pendulum the ribbon while she brushes. ‘She’s been rolling around in the breakers, Momma.’ Unlike the rest of us – who have Momma’s scribble of a figure – Kitty is soft and plump and doesn’t feel the coldness of the ocean. Like Barney, she doesn’t have any fear of it either – wading out into the waves until Momma sprints in and