At the station, all was how you’d imagine:

The coffee smell of brakes.

The overnight train.

The orange globes of light.

Clay had his sports bag, and there were no clothes in it; only the wooden box, the books of Claudia Kirkby and The Quarryman.

The train was ready to leave.

We shook hands—all of us and him.

Halfway to the last carriage, it was Rory who called out.

“Oi, Clay!”

He turned back.

“The coins, remember?”

And happily, he boarded the train.

And again, again, the mystery—how the four of us all stood watch there, with the smell of the brakes and a dog.

By the end of my first year of high school, it was apparent we were in serious trouble. There was so much air in her clothes by then; she’d be better less and less. There were times, it seemed, that were normal, or something we kind of mimicked. Pretend-normal, or normal-pretend, I’m not sure how we did it.

Maybe it was just that we all had lives, we had to get by, and that included Penelope; us boys kept being kids. We kept it all together:

There was the haircut, there was Beethoven.

There was for all of us something personal.

You know your mother’s dying when she takes you out individually.

We skip the moments like stones.

* * *

—

The others were all still in primary school (Rory, his last year), and expected still to piano, even when she was in the hospital. In later years, Henry swore she’d stayed alive just to torture them with practice, or even just to ask about it, no matter which bed she lay in—the faded sheets of home, or the other ones, the bitter ones, so perfect, bleached and white.

The problem was (and Penelope finally resigned herself to it) that she had to face the reality:

They were so much better at fighting.

/> Their piano playing was shithouse.

As for all the questioning, it was pretty much reduced to ritual.

Mostly in the hospital, she’d ask if they’d practiced, and they lied and said they had. Often they showed up and their lips were cut and their knuckles split, and Penny was damp and jaundiced-looking, but also rightly suspicious. “What on earth is going on?”

“Nothing, Mum. Really.”

“Are you practicing?”

“Practicing what?”

Tags: Markus Zusak
Source: readsnovelonline.net