spends his Saturdays skulking up trees or hiding down holes.’
The sound of the Nine o’Clock News filled the hallway as the living-room door opened. Julia switched to her Kate voice. ‘Got that bit, yeah, Kate, but I still can’t get my head round question nine. I’d better check your answers before the test. Okay…okay. Thanks. See you in the morning. G’night.’
‘Sort it out?’ Dad called from the kitchen.
‘Pretty much,’ said Julia, zipping up her pencil case.
Julia’s an ace liar. She’s applied to do law at university and she’s got several offers of places already. (Lawyer-liar, liar-lawyer. Never noticed that before.) The idea of any boy snogging my sister makes me grab the vomit bucket but quite a few sixth-formers fancy her. I bet Ewan’s one of these super-confident kids who wears Blue Stratos and winkle-pickers and hair like Nick Heyward from Haircut 100. I bet Ewan speaks in well-drilled sentences that march by perfectly, like my cousin Hugo. Speaking well is the same as commanding.
God knows what job I’m going to be able to do. Not a lawyer, that’s for sure. You can’t stammer in court. You can’t stammer in a classroom, either. My students’d crucify me. There aren’t many jobs where speaking isn’t a part of it. I can’t be a professional poet, ’cause Miss Lippetts said once nobody buys poetry. I could be a monk, but church is more boring than watching the test card. Mum made us go to Sunday school at St Gabriel’s when we were smaller but it turned every Sunday morning into torture by boredom. Even Mum got bored after a few months. Being trapped in a monastery’d be murder. How about a lighthouse keeper? All those storms, sunsets and Dairylea sandwiches’d make you lonely in the end. But lonely is something I’d better get used to. What girl’d go out with a stammerer? Or even dance with one? The last song at the Black Swan Green village hall disco’d be over before I could spit out D-d-d-you want to d-d-d-d-d-dance. Or what if I stammered at my wedding and couldn’t even say ‘I do’?
‘Were you listening in just now?’
Julia’d appeared, leaning on my door frame.
‘What?’
‘You heard me. Were you eavesdropping on my phone call just now?’
‘What phone call?’ My reply was too fast and too innocent.
‘If you ask me,’ my sister’s glare made my face begin to smoke, ‘a little privacy isn’t too much to ask. If you had any friends to phone, Jason, I wouldn’t listen in on you. People who eavesdrop are such maggots.’
‘I wasn’t eavesdropping!’ How whiney I sounded.
‘So how come your door was closed three minutes ago, but now it’s wide open?’
‘I don’t—’ (Hangman seized ‘know’ so I had to abort the sentence, spazzishly.) ‘What’s it to you? The room felt stuffy.’ (Hangman let ‘stuffy’ go unchallenged.) ‘I went to the bog. A draught opened it.’
‘A draught? Sure, there’s a hurricane blowing over the landing. I can hardly stand upright.’
‘I wasn’t listening in on you!’
Julia said nothing for long enough to tell me she knew I was bullshitting. ‘Who said you could borrow Abbey Road?’
Her LP was by my crappy record player. ‘You hardly listen to it.’
‘Even if that were true, it wouldn’t make it your property. You never wear Granddad’s watch. Does that make it my property?’ She entered my room to get her record, stepping over my Adidas bag. Julia glanced at my typewriter. Lurching with shame, I hid my poem with my body. ‘So you agree,’ her real meaning as subtle as nutcrackers, ‘a little privacy isn’t too much to ask? And if this record has a single scratch on it, you’re dead.’
Through the ceiling’s coming not Abbey Road but ‘The Man with the Child in His Eyes’ by Kate Bush. Julia only plays ‘The Man with the Child in His Eyes’ when she’s hyper-emotional or when she’s got her period. Life must be pretty brill for Julia. She’s eighteen, she’s leaving Black Swan Green in a few months, she’s got a boyfriend with a sports car, she gets twice as much pocket money as me, and she can make other people do whatever she wants with words.
Just words.
Julia’s just put on ‘Songbird’ by Fleetwood Mac.
Dad gets up before it’s light on Wednesdays ’cause he’s got to drive to Oxford for a midweek meeting at Greenland HQ. The garage is below my bedroom, so I hear his Rover 3500 growl into life. If it’s raining like this morning its tyres shssssssh on the puddly drive and