Pureheart Read Online Free

MOR-ris.’
    â€˜Iv-an BOYD.’
    Her reputation as the mad granddaughter of her mad grandmother had preceded her. They already had a reason to regard Deirdre with suspicion, especially as she had never been seen at school before. Then there were her odd looks. And now the saying of the name.
    There was a vacancy for the most unpopular child in the class. There always is. She slotted into it like a square peg broken to fit into a round hole.
    She felt hot and clumsy and conspicuous, unbearably conspicuous. And she felt sick with doom, with a sense that she had done something that she could never undo, something that had begun a dreadful chain of events that would never be able to be halted.
    And in a way she was right.
    But then there was Gal.
    Sitting in the front row on the opposite side from her, next to the window, it was he who went last. When the teacher wearily nodded at him it took a split-second before he could drag himself back from the remote place he had apparently been dwelling in. But then, in a completely neutral voice, he said, ‘Galahad.’
    The class went still. Suddenly Deirdre was not so interesting any more.
    The teacher looked up sharply. Surely this was insolence; surely the boy’s name was not Galahad. But it was impossible not to believe he was serious. If anything – although his intensely blue eyes were turned towards her – he looked absent, as if he were thinking about something else. Something so far from the here and now that it might have been in another world.
    Every eye was upon him. Except Deirdre’s. She was looking at the floorboards.
    He had saved her. Again. For the time being.
    She had known he would never mock her. Not even if every other child in the class did it first. And she already knew his name. Her grandmother had named them both.
    â€˜And your surname?’
    â€˜Dark,’ said Gal quickly, as if it were obvious.
    â€˜So we have two Darks,’ said the teacher.
    She was from out of town. It didn’t occur to her that they were related.
    For Deirdre, as the weeks passed, things got worse and worse. For Gal they did not change. Except that, for Gal, things getting worse for Deirdre was the same as things getting worse for him.
    Neither of them had any friends. But people hated her. They respected him. And secretly feared him. Perhaps they feared her too. In a different way.
    On that first day, despite her long plaits and her strangely dark eyes, she had not looked so very different from the rest of them – just old-fashioned. Nobody had worked out what they were supposed to wear yet. But as the weeks passed, the other girls began to acquire the uniform of adolescence – as conceived in that time and place – no doubt the result of arguments their mothers lost.
    No one had ever lost an argument with Deirdre’s grandmother. So Deirdre dressed, not like an adolescent, or a twelve year old trying to look like an adolescent, but like a twelve year old dressed by her grandmother. She continued to wear her hair middle parted, in two long plaits with ribbons on the ends; her skirts were longer than they should have been; and all her buttons were done up. She was neat and ironed and mended and dry cleaned, and she was only permitted to wear white underwear. She always did her homework. And she only knew classical music.
    All of this was, of course, social death. But it wasn’t just the clothes, or even the music or the homework. There were other things, things that were quite beyond her. She didn’t fully understand what she was doing wrong.
    She did not understand, for example, how important it was not to show that you wanted to learn. Gal understood; he just didn’t care. Thus she and Gal were the only two interested-looking students in the class. But although they despised her for it, they left him alone.
    Every time they spoke to, or, more often, about her, they said her name in that same way. And they only spoke to