Free The Home Corner by Ruth Thomas Page A

question. And then I’d gone upstairs and pinned the letter onto my noticeboard, and it had stayed there ever since.
     
    One of the few concessions in my room to my St Luke’s job was something John Singer had made for me a few weeks earlier . This was a figure created from green cartridge paper. It had crescent-moon-shaped stickers dotted all over it and it consisted of six circles – head, body, four limbs – all secured by split pins. There was a drawing of a face on the biggest circle at the top: two misaligned eyes and a mad, lopsided smile. Written along one arm, in green felt-tip pen, it said:
    missmckenze
    I quite liked it: it was a sweet gift. Also it was a truer likeness, I couldn’t help thinking sometimes, than my own reflection in the dressing-table mirror. Because I couldn’t quite see myself any more – I couldn’t see what other people might be able to see. I couldn’t even tell if I was pretty or plain. The best I could make out, through half-closed eyes, was what the French called  jolie laide . My face was pale and quite thin. My hair, illuminated by the sunlight coming in through the Velux window, had recently turned Ribena pink. It was what my old physics teacher would have called magenta. ‘You mix magenta with yellow to get red,’ I could remember him saying to us once, ‘and with cyan to get blue: disco colours !’ But it was clear that dyeing your hair did not alter anything: it did not cause the world to open out before you like a dance floor.
    I hung around upstairs for a while and listened to the sound of my mother unpacking the shopping. I’d got into the habit that summer of skulking upstairs while my mother was in the kitchen being practical.
    ‘. . . some of that nice peppery ham we had a couple of weeks ago . . .’ I heard her saying to my father, and then the kitchen door closed.
    I lay down on my bed and closed my eyes. A small breeze trickled through the open window and across my face. I was aware of a cloud floating past, darkening the room for a few moments. There was the sound of two children on the pavement outside, shouting something about the correct way to throw a ball.
     *
    When I went downstairs, it had turned five. The kitchen seemed squarer than normal for some reason and was full of a bright, wavering sunlight, like the light in a swimming pool or an aquarium. From the fruit bowl in the middle of the table rose the smell of cantaloupe melon . There was half a Dundee cake on a melamine plate. Outside, swifts were calling, dipping and diving in the huge blue sky.
    My mother had unpacked all the shopping, I noticed, with shame. She had stashed it away in the cupboards, while I’d been hanging around upstairs like Greta Garbo.
    ‘You were quick,’ I said.
    ‘You were slow,’ retorted my father, who was sitting at the table.
    And there was a moment’s lull, as if the room was drawing breath. I leaned against the message board on the wall, against the Family Organiser that my mother had pinned there the previous January. It had illustrations on every page depicting happy families through the seasons. The green and blue squares relating to my parents’ lives were full of event    (Dinner with Sue and Malcolm; to cinema; book tickets for Skye...) The orange squares relating to mine were a series of blanks.
    ‘Hungry, sweetheart?’ my mother asked, the way she always did.
    ‘Not really,’ I replied, my voice emerging small and stuck from my throat.
    My mother looked at me.
    ‘Have you got hay fever?’ she asked, sympathetically.
    And I moved away from the wall, causing the Family Organiser to swing on its hook and dislodging a postcard. Having a great break , I read, as I stooped to pick it up. Weather not bad. Food quite good. Went to the Maspalomas dunes today. Love, Wendy and Ron.
    But why had Wendy and Ron bothered to write and tell my parents that? What were the Maspalomas dunes, anyway? My mother always pinned up the cards their friends sent – an