Room Upstairs (27 page)

Well, there it was. She stood irresolute in the middle of her kitchen. She had got so used to people telling her the next move at any given moment that when they all went away and left her alone, she did not know what to do.

The cars on the road were like the singing of blood in the ears. Someone thinking of me. Tell me a number. A, B, C, D …
orothy.

Behind her, Dorothy said huskily: ‘Come on, Sybil.'

Now! She ran, dragging her foot, knowing that Dorothy was behind her, with blood red nostrils and lipstick on her fangs. Out over the lawn, stooping to push through the veil of the weeping beech, gasping in the little green caye, her hand on the safe grey hide. A rustling of the leaves - who's there! She struggled out through the other side, and ran zigzag from tree to tree, touching them, stumbling over the roots.

Papa! Pinafore strings flying, she ran down in to the gentle valley to find him going ahead of her up to the barn with the cows. Wait for me, Papa! The wire fence tore at her clothes, and she staggered blindly up the slope, her eyes straining at the dusk to see him swinging a stick among the brown and white cattle. Wait for me!

The car struck, and tossed her like a bundle of rags back to the side of the road.

*

‘It was the damnedest thing. The damnedest thing. I guess I -I thought I saw - it's crazy - I thought I saw - cows wandering across the highway.'

‘Light's tricky, this time of day.' No one wanted to condemn.

‘He's been eight hours on the road,' the driver's wife said. ‘We'd better get you to a doctor, honey.'

*

After they had taken Sybil away, and there was nothing more to do, Jess went into the kitchen to kill the bird.

But he was dead on the floor of his cage, lying on his back, his claws curled, his breast stuck up like a pouter pigeon.

This electronic edition published in 2011 by Bloomsbury Reader

Bloomsbury Reader is a division of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc, 50 Bedford Square, London WC1B 3DP.

Copyright © Monica Dickens, 1966

First published 1966 by William Heinemann Ltd.

The moral right of the author has been asserted

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ISBN: 9781448206681
eISBN: 9781448206322

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