Free Daughters Of Eden: The Eden Series Book 1 by Charlotte Bingham Page B

protested.
    But the idea appealed to the other children as being so awfully funny that they kept repeating it to each other, until Billy began to cry. He cried all that night, and was still crying the next morning. Even a beating with Uncle Mikey’s belt failed to stem his tears, which seemed to surprise the perpetrator.
    â€˜It usually works,’ he told Pet, shrugging his shoulders, before going off to the pub.
    After that Pet and Uncle Mikey left him alone, much as owners might abandon a barking dog to its kennel, perhaps because they had never seen anyone cry with such anguish before. As it happened neither had Marjorie. She had seen other little girls crying themselves to sleep at night in their narrow rickety iron beds with only a much-darned sheet and two thin grey blankets for warmth, but Billy’s tears were different. At first they terrified her, then they upset her, and finally they moved her to comfort him. Finding him alone and crying in the garden she held him carefully in her young arms and rocked him backwards and fowards, until, at long last, his tears stopped.
    For a moment Marjorie, feeling vaguely astonished, looked down at Billy’s pinched white face with its startlingly red eyes, wondering if he might have died of exhaustion, or expired from sorrow. He seemed to feel the same.
    â€˜I want to die.’
    â€˜No you don’t, Billy.’
    â€˜I do—’
    â€˜No, you don’t—’
    â€˜Yes, I do – I know I do. I want to die.’
    â€˜No, you don’t.’
    â€˜Why?’
    â€˜â€™Cos there’s no talking when you’re dead, that’s why.’
    â€˜I don’t want to talk to anyone.’
    â€˜Yes, you do. And you don’t want to die, not even I do.’
    Actually Marjorie was lying. Her first few months at the school she had certainly wanted to die. She had prayed to die. Finally she stopped praying, giving up on God, and wondering whether she might be able to finish her life for herself instead. She tried holding a pillow over her face, holding her breath for what seemed like minutes, before finally attempting to drown herself in the bath, where they were never allowed to draw more than three inches of water – water that was duly measured by the ever smiling Uncle Mikey, who used a six-inch ruler to check the depth while the children sat two to a tub with their arms folded tightly across their little chests in an effort to keep warm.
    Marjorie would wait till her companion had finally scrambled out of the bath, as soon as the last ounce of heat had evaporated, before turning herself back to front and lying face down in the shallow water. But as soon as she did, inevitably panic overcame her, and she would grab the side of the slippery bath before climbing out shivering and blue with the cold.
    After many such futile attempts she gave up further thoughts of ending her life, and went back to praying for some sort of salvation to arrive.
    â€˜You’re always sick, aren’t you?’ Pet would enquire, bending over the bed in which Marjorielanguished in what passed for a sanatorium. ‘You’re for ever sick, though search me as to what’s so wrong with you. It’s not as if you’re running much of a fever.’
    â€˜Told you we shouldn’t have taken this one on, Pet.’ Uncle Mikey smiled, standing upright to light a fresh cigarette. ‘She’s really not worth the keep.’
    â€˜If you were running a fever, dear,’ Pet said, leaning ever closer to Marjorie until the tip of her long, narrow nose was almost touching Marjorie’s face, ‘then I might think about calling Dr Peterson. But since you’re hardly running what
I’d
call a temperature we’ll keep you as is – in the sanatorium, on sick rations, with the window wide open just in case it’s something nasty.’
    â€˜She looks positively consumptive to me all right,’ Uncle Mikey