Free The House of Memories by Monica McInerney Page B

do that,” he said, his face turning red.
    “Who’s gonna stop us, Fatso? You and your girlfriend?”
    The tall boy reached across and, in what seemed like slow motion to me, shoved Charlie. I watched, horrified, as Charlie stumbled back against the crate. It tilted. He lost his balance and fell heavily. Paper cups and lemons scattered onto the footpath around him.
    The gang of boys laughed. I had to do something, and quickly. No one shoved my Charlie and got away with it. No one laughed at him or called him names either.
    As well as the American TV shows, we’d been watching American films. One of them was
The Karate Kid
. I’d never been to a single karate class, but the boys weren’t to know that. To their shock, and mine, I went into action. I leaped in between them and Charlie and made a strange high-pitched noise, a kind of “Ah-yah!” as I held up both hands at an angle.
    “Watch out,” I shouted as loudly as I could. It was pretty loud. “I’m a black belt.”
    They started laughing. One of them threw another lemon at Charlie, who was still lying on the footpath. It hit him on the head.
    I shouted at them again.
“No!”
    There’s something glorious about letting fury rise inside you. It’s like a gas flame, a whoosh of pure emotion. I turned mine up to high and went for it. I was twelve, tall for my age, thin and fast. I seriously didn’t have a clue about karate, but I knew from the films that it involved a lot of quick kicks and hand slices. As luck would have it, my first kick landed right where it would hurt, on the tallest of the four boys. He doubled up. Another kick landed behind the knee of a second boy. He crumpled. That was it in terms of my armory, but they weren’t to know. I kept shouting, making so much noise that a neighbor came out to see what was happening.
    “What the hell’s going on here?” he said. He was more than six foot tall and very broad.
    The sight of an adult was what made the boys run, not me—I know that—but I still took pleasure in seeing them run down the street, the tallest one bent over, groaning.
    “Are you two okay?” the neighbor asked.
    I was panting, but I nodded. Charlie nodded too.
    We packed up swiftly. I looked over at Charlie. His face was red, but he was smiling.
    It wasn’t until we started walking that he spoke. “Wow, Ella,” he said.
    I smiled all the way home too. Neither of us told Mum or Walter what had happened. It was our own excellent secret.
    I turned thirteen, fourteen, fifteen. I went through puberty, with some alarm at first. Charlie got taller, a bit fatter and even cleverer. He topped his class each year, became a skilled debater, applied to be a Rotary exchange student and was immediately accepted. After he passed his final-year exams, he’d be spending a year in the US. I think I was prouder of him than Walter was.
    Meanwhile, Jess was growing older too. Older and bolder, as the saying goes. The house still seemed to revolve around her. When I was with her, I was often conscious of difficult, spiky feelings, not the warm, amused feeling I had when I was with Charlie. It bothered me, especially the older I got. Was it because she was only half my sister? Or was it just that I didn’t actually like her very much? I couldn’t work out which one.
    The age difference—eleven years in my case, thirteen years in Charlie’s—meant that we didn’t have huge amounts to do with each other, particularly once Charlie and I went to high school. Our after-school lives became as busy as at school. I played hockey, sang in the school choir, volunteered in the local library. Charlie studied, and studied some more. In between studying, he wrote to his dozens of pen pals. The mailbox was always full, every day, with letters for him from all over the world, part of his involvement with the Rotary clubs. He’d applied for pen pals as part of his mission to be chosen as an exchange student, and then got hooked. He didn’t just write one