Free The Monkey Puzzle Tree by Sonia Tilson

answers, Gillian took her rock cake out to the garden, planning to sit in the elderberry tree, now in full flower, and try to calm down. About to perch on the usual branch, she saw that the bark where she wanted to sit had come loose, and tugged at it with her free hand. She leapt back with a yelp, dropping the rock-cake. Woodlice, each about a third of an inch long, swarmed over the exposed limb, crawling away into crevices on their multiple hair-like legs, or curling into serrated grey balls and dropping off the tree into the dirt. Shuddering, she ran back into the house. She would retreat to her bedroom and read something, anything, as long as it was not about insects or exams, or people being mean to each other. Shutting the bedroom door, she took Five Run Away Together off her bookshelf in the vain hope of putting Vanna’s strange behaviour out of her mind. “Why did she fail?” she kept asking herself, “Why didn’t she even try?”
     
    W
     
    “You never told me what went wrong with that exam.” Gillian waved away the plate of chocolate digestive biscuits Vanna was offering. “I remember I could see there was something the matter, because you hadn’t any socks on, and your arm was all bruised. I know we sort of made it up some years later, Vanna, but we never went into what happened, and there was always that tension between us. And of course, I’ve been away for most of our lives. But I wish I could finally understand what went on.”
    Vanna stood up to light a cigarette, nearly dropping the heavy silver table-lighter onto the coffee table before stalking over to the window. “The night before the exam,” she said, “My da came home even drunker than usual. He’d lost his job and couldn’t face what that meant, I suppose. He saw all the things my mother’d bought for me—pencils, pen, box of nibs, ruler and so on—and my best blouse and skirt and white socks airing over the back of a chair by the fire she’d lit specially.
    “And what’s all this fancy bloody gear for?” he says. “Who paid for this, then?” And when my mother, God rest her soul, tells him it’s for my big day tomorrow, and that she knows he’ll be wanting me to do well, he says, “You know bugger all!” and throws the whole lot into the fire.
    “That’s how I burned my fingers, trying to get stuff out, and why I couldn’t hardly hold my pen the next day.” She took a quick drag on her cigarette and blew out a cloud of smoke. “Anyway, the little ones were all screaming, while himself was waving the poker and shouting about throwing away good money, as if he’d never in his whole bloody life done any such thing at all. Then he said I’d turn out to be a useless, head-in-the-air, bluestocking like my mother, and he wasn’t having that. And don’t ask me why I said that about the hair in the nib, and why I didn’t tell Miss Thomas all about it. I had my pride, if nothing else.” She ground out her cigarette savagely in the cut-glass ashtray.
    Gillian smoothed the burled walnut surface of the coffee table with her finger. “I remember your father died not long after that, didn’t he?”
    Vanna lit another cigarette. “He did so. He was coming home from the pub, legless as usual, and got run over by another drunk. And wasn’t that the best thing that ever happened to our family at all?” She squinted narrowly at Gillian through the smoke.
    Gillian felt she could hardly argue with that, especially after Vanna went on to say that her mother’s father, after he heard Michael Farrell was dead, had regularly sent them enough money to live on comfortably, until he himself died, leaving her mother a fair sum. She had died happy, Vanna said, knowing that all six children were provided for.
    “You never know what’s round the corner, right?” She raised a sculpted eyebrow at Gillian. “As my Da must have said when he saw Dai Jones’s van coming at him. God rest his poor soul, after all!”
    After a light supper,