Free The Home Corner by Ruth Thomas Page B

organised trait I’d not inherited. I always just lost them. Or kept them, then threw them away at the wrong time. I’d discarded nearly all the letters Beate Groschler had sent me, for instance, keeping only the first couple, in which she’d told me she played the piano and had blue eyes and liked swimming; and the last one, when she’d enquired when I would be cracking up.
    ‘Maybe you could set the table,’ my mother said. ‘We’ll need forks. Because there’s going to be coleslaw.’
    ‘Right.’
    And I paper-clipped Wendy Williams’ postcard back up and began to plod about the room. I went over to the cutlery drawer, clattered out the knives and forks and crashed them down on the table. I placed plates into the spaces between.
    *
    ‘So, we met an old schoolfriend of Luisa’s in Safeways this afternoon,’ my mother reported brightly to my father , once we were all sitting down at the table, contemplating tea. ‘Do you remember Stella?’ she continued. ‘Friend of Luisa’s? She used to come round quite a lot a couple of years back, when . . . before . . .’ 
    And her voice adopted a sudden note of regret, and she stopped talking.
    ‘Stella?’ my father queried vaguely, picking up his fork and pronging a slice of ham with it. ‘D’you mean the one who got all the As?’
    I looked across the room and out through the window. My heart felt curled up, unyielding, like a walnut in a shell. My mother glanced across at me and lowered her voice slightly. ‘Anyway,’ she said, ‘she’s studying to be a vet now . . .’
    ‘Is she?’
    ‘Yes: and she seems to be having quite a time, doesn’t she, Luisa?’
    ‘Yes.’
    ‘She’s obviously very . . . busy with things, anyway. Has quite a busy . . . schedule . . .’
    I am sitting in the same chair I sat in when I was five , I thought. I am sitting opposite the same picture on the wall. I’d painted that picture for my mother when I was small: it was a kind of explosion of flowers with the words Happy Days Are Coming written underneath. My mother had liked it circa 1982, and put it in the frame, and there it had stayed. And ever since, Happy Days Are Coming had been in my head when I sat in the kitchen, like a kind of truth you don’t question.
    ‘Anyway,’ my mother said, ‘she was certainly full of the joys of spring.’
    It was like trying to fit into a place I was too big for. It was like being the freakishly large Alice in Alice in Wonderland , my limbs poking out through the doors and windows.
    ‘Was she?’ my father said, looking, suddenly, a little lost. Neither of my parents had mentioned my recent change of hair colour; not once, since I’d appeared in the kitchen, transformed, the previous evening. They’d just glanced at it, as if it might imply something more worrying. The beetroot slices, sitting in a bowl in front of me, were pretty much the same colour as my hair. ‘It’s a very odd thing / As odd as can be . . .’ I thought, remembering another poem from school – ‘That whatever Miss T eats turns into Miss T . . .’ – and then I speared a slice of beetroot with my fork and put it into my mouth.
    ‘So, all set for school tomorrow?’ my father asked as we progressed onto the fruit salad.
    ‘Yes,’ I said, levelly. ‘I’m reading with the Fantastic Foxes tomorrow. Then I’ll probably be helping out in the Home Corner.’
    ‘The Fantastic Foxes? What’s the Fantastic Foxes?’ asked my father, and my heart sank.
    ‘It’s a reading group,’ I explained. ‘We also have Excellent Elephants, Terrific Tigers and Cool Cats.’
    ‘Oh, have you? And which one’s top?’
    ‘Sorry?’
    ‘Which one’s the top reading group?’
    ‘That’s not the point, Dad. That’s why they’ve been given those names. So you can’t tell who’s top.’
    ‘Hah!’ my father said. ‘But surely it’s going to be obvious, isn’t it? Surely if one group’s reading War and Peace and another group’s reading Peter and Jane ,