The Girls Read Online Free Page B

sun was getting low. She saw Grace hugging herself to keep warm. It was nearly five o’clock. Time to think about tea.
    ‘What do you fancy?’ she asked, meeting her daughters at the back door. ‘I can do spaghetti with peas?’
    The girls dropped their garden froideur as they came indoors and said yum, and yes please. Spaghetti and peas. A favourite family staple. And cheap too, which was just as well now that Clare was living off a finite sum of money.
    The girls joined her in the small kitchen where they sat side by side on bar stools at the breakfast bar. Hard to tell them apart sometimes, especially when they were seated and you couldn’t see the two-inch difference in height. The same big square faces and almond eyes. The same mass of brown curls and bright hazel irises. They both looked just like him. Just like their dad.
    ‘So,’ said Clare, bunching raw spaghetti into her fist and forcing it down into a pan of boiling water, ‘did you see anyone out there?’
    ‘A girl came and talked to us,’ said Pip. ‘She’s called Tyler.’
    ‘Oh,’ said Clare, ‘was she nice?’
    ‘Not really,’ said Pip.
    ‘Bit of a bitch,’ said Grace.
    ‘Oh,’ said Clare again, prodding stray sticks of spaghetti under the surface of the water with a fork. ‘That’s a shame. By the way, I forgot to tell you: your onesies came today. From Next. They’re in the hallway. But don’t rip the bag open! ’ she yelled after Pip who was already halfway out of the door. ‘In case we have to send them back!’
    Pip brought the parcel through and together the girls pulled out the clear plastic bags. Pip handed Grace the one in her size and then they both tried them on. Clare watched her girls undressing, absorbed their shapes: broad and strong, already dipping at the waist, Grace in her junior bra, Pip still flat-chested, the pronounced S-bends of their bodies and the small doughy tummies that neither girl was as yet at all concerned about. Their father’s bodies, too. Not Clare’s. Clare had been a painfully skinny child, flat-chested well into her teens, and was still slight and bordering on bony. It would not be long, she mused, until both her girls towered over her, until they could carry her around like a child.
    They zipped up their onesies and stood before her, striking poses to make her laugh. ‘You both look adorable,’ she said, pulling open the freezer door. ‘Like lovely overgrown babies.’
    The day became dark and Clare began the process of pulling shut the blinds and curtains, of running a bath for the girls, stacking the dishwasher; the girls clean and glowing in their onesies doing their homework side by side, the sound of the TV going on, a mug of camomile and all three of them together, warm and safe in their tiny flat.
    At nine thirty she came to kiss the girls goodnight. They were reading by the pale light of table-lamps, Grace leaning against her bedhead, her knees brought up to her chest, Pip curled foetal-style with her book held on its side. Pip glanced up at her and smiled. But there was something brittle about the upturn of her mouth and Clare realised that she was on the verge of tears.
    ‘When can we see Daddy?’ Pip asked.
    Clare sighed and brushed Pip’s forehead with the palm of her hand. ‘I truly don’t know.’
    ‘When will he reply to my letters?’
    ‘I really and truly don’t know.’
    Grace lifted her head from her book and peered disdainfully at Pip over the top of her knees. ‘Why do you keep going on about it? I mean, seriously, he’s just scary. I don’t care if I never see him again.’
    Clare sighed again. They were treading familiar ground.
    ‘I want to go to see the house,’ said Pip.
    ‘Oh, God.’ Clare pushed Pip’s hair off her forehead. ‘I really don’t think—’
    ‘Please. Please, Mum. I’ll go on my own …’
    ‘Don’t be silly. You can’t go on your own. You wouldn’t even know how to get there.’
    ‘Yes I do. I’d get the bus.’
    ‘I