The thirteenth tale Read Online Free Page A

the three
pigs. I’ll huff and I’ll puff and I’ll blow your house down! He wouldn’t have
had any trouble blowing my parents’ house down. The pale, airy rooms were too
insubstantial to rest, and the furniture, with its brittle delicacy, would
collapse like a pile matchsticks if a wolf so much as looked at it. Yes, that
wolf would have the house down with a mere whistle, and the three of us would
be breakfast in no time. I began to wish I was in the shop, where I was never
afraid. The wolf could huff and puff all he liked; with all those books
doubling the thickness of the walls Father and I would be as safe as in a
fortress.
     
    Upstairs I peered into the bathroom mirror. It was for
reassurance, to see what I looked like as a grown-up girl. Head tilted to the
left, then to the right, I studied my reflection from all angles, willing
myself to see someone different. But it was only me looking back at myself.
     
    My own room held no promise. I knew every inch of it and it knew
me; we were dull companions now. Instead, I pushed open the door of the guest
room. The blank-faced wardrobe and bare dressing table paid lip service to the
idea that you could brush your hair and get dressed here, but somehow you knew
that behind their doors and drawer fronts they were empty. The bed, its sheets
and blankets tightly tucked in and smoothed down, was uninviting. The thin
pillows looked as though they had had the life drained out of them. It was
always called the guest room, but we never had guests. It was where my mother
slept.
     
    Perplexed, I backed out of the room and stood on the landing.
     
    This was it. The rite of passage. Staying home alone. I was
joining the ranks of the grown-up children: Tomorrow I would be able to say, in
the playground, “Last night I didn’t go to a sitter. I stayed home by myself.”
The other girls would be wide-eyed. For so long I had wanted this, and now that
it was here, I didn’t know what to make of it. I’d expected that I would expand
to fit the experience automatically, that I would get my first glimpse of the
person I was destined to be. I’d expected the world to give up its childlike
and familiar appearance to show me its secret, adult side. Instead, cloaked in
my new independence, I felt younger than ever. Was there something wrong with
me? Would I ever find out how to grow up?
     
    I toyed with the idea of going round to Mrs. Robb’s. But no.
There was a better place. I crawled under my father’s bed.
     
    The space between the floor and the bed frame had shrunk since I
was last there. Hard against one shoulder was the holiday suitcase, as gray in
daylight as it was here in the dark. It held all our summer paraphernalia:
sunglasses, spare film for the camera, the swimming costume that my mother
never wore but never threw away. On the other side vas a cardboard box. My
fingers fumbled with the corrugated flaps, bund a way in, and rummaged. The
tangled skein of Christmas-tree lights. Feathers covering the skirt of the tree
angel. The last time I was under this bed I had believed in Father Christmas.
Now I didn’t. Was that a kind of growing up?
     
    Wriggling out from under the bed, I dislodged an old biscuit
tin. “here it was, half sticking out from under the frill of the valance. I
remembered the tin—it had been there forever. A picture of Scottish crags and
firs on a lid too tight to open. Absently I tried the lid. It gave way so
easily under my older, stronger fingers that I felt a pang of shock. Inside was
Father’s passport and various, differently sized pieces of paper. Forms, part
printed, part handwritten. Here and there a signature.
     
    For me, to see is to read. It has always been that way. I
flicked through the documents. My parents’ marriage certificate. Their birth certificates.
My own birth certificate. Red print on cream paper. My father’s signature. I
refolded it carefully, put it with the other forms