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SELFISH PEOPLE
Lucy English
Fourth Estate
An Imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers 1 London Bridge Street London SE1 9GF
First published in Great Britain in 1998 by
Copyright © 1998 by Lucy English
The right of Lucy English to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by her in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
Lines from Mrs Robinson
Copyright © 1968 by Paul Simon
Used by permission of the Publisher
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Source ISBN: 9781857027631
Ebook Edition © MARCH 2016 ISBN: 9780007484935 Version: 2016-02-29
TO MY FAMILY
CONTENTS
This is a dream. I’m in the middle of a field making a daisy chain. The chain is long and curled round and round in my lap. Rachel, next to me, is knitting a picture jumper. Trees, long grass, buttercups, she is knitting the countryside around us. Knitting fast and the picture pours out of her hands. Now a piece of sky, now an elder bush. We don’t speak. The needles clack. I can smell the hot sun on the grass. The field is so full of daisies it’s bursting. The chain is longer. Then the jumper changes and the blue sky becomes grey and more grey. ‘Because I’m sad,’ says Rachel …
She woke up and she knew she had to see Rachel. Across her room the geraniums cast grey shadows on the rug and this confirmed it; Rachel always wore grey. It was eight o’clock, too early for a Sunday morning, but Al was shouting at the children. Her dream snapped shut and she ran downstairs.
‘What’s going on?’ There was milk on the floor and Shreddies everywhere.
‘We were hungry,’ they wept.
‘It’s too much. They woke me at six.’ Al, in his stripy dressing gown, stood in the middle of the room picking damp Shreddies off his foot.
‘I was asleep,’ apologised Leah. She had done the wrong thing, again. He began to clean up, ineffectively. He had fair curly hair which he hadn’t brushed for days and it was now matted at the back. It irritated Leah.
‘Let me do it. You go back to bed.’
‘I