Interpreters Read Online Free Page B

weren’t really allowed to use the kettle, but she left it to get cold. She just sat there crying for hours and hours. We’d seen her cry before, but only once or twice, and nothing like this. We put ourselves to bed and lay shivering in the dark. We heard our father come home, and eventually go upstairs and into the bedroom – and then the screaming started. Some time, in the middle of the night, I woke up. My mother was still crying and shouting at my father. If he was still in the room, he wasn’t saying anything.
    I got out of bed and went into Max’s room. The bed was empty. I opened the cupboard door.
    ‘Listen,’ I said. ‘Listen to what she’s saying.’
    But Max slept on, his white blanket pulled up around his ears.
    So yes, that day, when I came home to an empty house, I knew exactly what had happened. My mother had lied and then she’d gone mad – that was why she had been so strange when she came to pick me up from Jackie’s house – and then she had been put away somewhere. In a way, I was relieved.
    ‘Were you glad?’ I asked Max years later in Dorset. We were standing in a field behind the Steiner school at which he had been teaching for the past three years. The fuchsia hedges, barely visible through the freezing fog, were stiff with frost. I had forgotten what English winters could be like, and my whole body rebelled against the biting cold.
    ‘Glad?’ he asked.
    ‘When Mum went away. That first time.’
    He didn’t answer. I turned to look at him. He was gazing over at a group of children bundled up in layers of colourful jumpers, stripy tights, bobble hats and woolly mittens who were playing skipping games, their breath rising in gusts of smoke and merging with the white sky.
    Windmill, windmill going round and round
    Along came the farmer with grain to grind.
    He was smiling – a smile suffused with such serenity that I wanted to push him to the frozen ground and hit him very hard.
    ‘Is it compulsory to wear hand-knitted rainbow jumpers at a Steiner school?’ I asked viciously. ‘And Peruvian hats with ear flaps?’
    ‘Sorry?’ he replied, not taking his eyes off the children.
    ‘And do you have to be called Griffin or Ocean or… or… Gaia? What if you’re called Kevin or Penelope or something? What if your father’s a tax accountant or a civil servant, or a bus conductor, and not a bloody biodynamic beekeeper or a llama-breeder or… or a fucking shaman ? What if you feel uncomfortable cultivating your dreadlocks and your organic dope? If it’s not really you ? What if you want to grow dahlias ?’
    ‘Why are you so angry?’ he asked quietly, turning to look at me.
    ‘Why aren’t you?’ I shouted, my voice hoarse with cold and fury.
    The small skippers stopped their game. They looked over at us, curious to see what would happen next. Max squeezed my arm then walked up to the children. He hugged the smallest one then crouched down and said something to them that I couldn’t hear. After a few seconds the children regrouped and two of them began turning the rope.
    ‘Higher!’ Max shouted.
    The two rope-turners grasped the end of the rope with both hands, their faces screwed up with effort and concentration, and the rope soared high above them.
    Max leaped forward and, as the rope touched the ground, he jumped. He did star jumps, tuck jumps; he hopped first on one foot and then the other. His long blond curls danced around his head. The children laughed and yelled out words of encouragement. I watched Max’s face. And what I saw was joy. Sheer joy.
    ‘Come on!’ he called to me, holding out his arms. But I shook my head and walked away so that the children wouldn’t see me cry.
    ‘I didn’t know you could skip,’ I said later, as we sat by the fire in the little cottage he shared with another teacher and a couple of ancient lurchers he had inherited from a neighbour who had died a couple of years ago. ‘You’re quite good.’ The wood was damp and spat on to the