Meggie opened the book of poems. She had to narrow her eyes because the sun was shining in her face so brightly, and before beginning to read she looked over her shoulder to make quite sure Mo hadn’t followed her down. She didn’t want him to catch her at what she was planning to do. She was ashamed of it, but the temptation was just too great.
When she was perfectly sure no one was coming she took a deep breath, cleared her throat – and began. She shaped every word with her lips the way she had seen Mo do it, almost tenderly, as if every letter were a musical note and any words spoken without love were a discord in the melody. But she soon realised that if she paid too much attention to every separate word the sentence didn’t sound right any more, and the pictures behind it were lost if she concentrated on the sound alone and not the sense. It was difficult. So difficult. And the sun was making her drowsy, until at last she closed the book and held her face up to its warm rays. It was silly of her to try anyway. Very silly …
Later that afternoon Pippo, Paula and Rico came back and Meggie walked round the village with them. They bought things in the shop where Mo had gone in the morning, sat on a wall on the outskirts of the village, watched ants carrying pine needles and flower seeds over the rough stones, and counted the ships sailing by on the distant sea.
A second day passed like this. Now and then Meggie wondered where Dustfinger could be, and whether Farid was still with him, how Elinor was, and if she was beginning to wonder where they were.
There was no answer to any of these questions, and Meggie didn’t find out what Fenoglio was doing behind his study door either. ‘Chewing his pencil,’ Paula told her when she had managed to hide under her grandfather’s desk. ‘Just chewing the end of his pencil and walking up and down.’
‘Mo, when are we going to Elinor’s house?’ Meggie asked on their second night, when she sensed that, yet again, he couldn’t sleep. She perched on the edge of his bed. The bed creaked just like hers.
‘Soon,’ he said. ‘Go to sleep again now, OK?’
‘Do you miss her – my mother, I mean?’ Meggie herself didn’t know why she asked that question out of the blue. All of a sudden it was there, on the tip of her tongue, and had to be spoken aloud.
It was a long time before Mo answered.
‘Sometimes,’ he said at last. ‘In the morning, at midday, in the evening, at night. Almost all the time.’
Meggie felt jealousy digging its little claws into her heart. She knew that feeling; she felt it every time Mo had a new girlfriend. But how could she be jealous of her own mother? ‘Tell me about her,’ she said quietly. ‘I don’t mean the made-up stories you used to tell.’
She used to search her books for a suitable mother, but there were hardly any mothers in her favourite stories. Tom Sawyer? No mother. Huck Finn? Ditto. Peter Pan and the Lost Boys? Not a mother in sight. Jim Button was motherless too – and all you found in fairy tales were wicked stepmothers, heartless, jealous stepmothers … the list could go on for ever. That had often comforted Meggie in the past. It didn’t seem particularly unusual not to have a mother, or at least not in the books she liked best.
‘What do you want me to tell you?’ Mo looked at the window. The tom cats were fighting outside again. Their yowls sounded like babies crying. ‘You look more like her than me, I’m glad to say. She laughs like you, and she chews a strand of hair while she’s reading exactly the way you do. She’s shortsighted, but too vain to wear glasses—’
‘I can understand that.’ Meggie sat down beside him. His arm hardly hurt him now. The bite from Basta’s dog had almost healed up, but there would always be a scar, pale as the scar Basta’s knife had left nine years ago.
‘What do you mean? I like glasses,’ said Mo.
‘I don’t. Go on.’
‘She loves stones, flat, smooth stones that fit comfortably into the hand. She always has one or two of them in her pocket, and she weights down books with them, specially paperbacks. She doesn’t like the covers to stick up in the air, but you were always taking the stones away and rolling them over the wooden floor.’
‘And then she was cross.’
‘Oh, I don’t know. She tickled your fat little neck until you let go of the stones.’ Mo turned round to look at her. ‘Do you really not miss her, Meggie?’
‘I don’t know. Well, only if I’m feeling angry with you.’