Interpreters by Sue Eckstein Page A

ever.’
    My mother didn’t say anything. I carried on with my hairdressing for a while.
    ‘Are you sure you can read?’ I asked eventually.
    She jerked her head away from my hands. ‘Of course I can read! I used to be just like you – reading all the time. I had even more books than you’ve got. And then. Well, that’s another story.’
    ‘And then what?’
    ‘And then,’ she said, struggling to her feet, ‘one day a bomb fell on my bedroom and they all got burned.’
    ‘Was that in the Blitz?’
    We had touched, very briefly, on the Second World War when we were presented with a middle-aged supply teacher from the north for History – the first male teacher ever to gain access to the staff room of my all-girls school. He had come to fill in for Miss Harvey – one of the teachers we knew to have tragically lost her fiancé in that very war. CarolineStatham said, wasn’t it a bit of a coincidence that Miss Harvey had been off school ever since her friend Miss Kingston, who taught sixth form science and who had also reputedly lost her fiancé in the war, had moved away to be deputy head of a girls’ school in Norwich? I said I didn’t think so really, and Caroline had rolled her eyes and carried on carving Max’s name into her desk with her compass.
    Mr Fielding’s grasp of the Tudors had turned out to be rather slight, so, having taught us a rhyme to help us remember the order and upshot of Henry VIII’s six marriages, he had decided to teach us about something ‘a little more recent and a great deal more bloody relevant’. Unfortunately, I could remember a lot more about his swearing in class, his badly fitting jacket and his unfamiliar vowel sounds than what D-Day and the Normandy landings were all about.
    ‘Mum?’
    ‘What, Julia?’
    ‘I said, was it in the Blitz that you lost all your books?’
    ‘Something like that. Now, goodnight.’ She leant down and kissed me on the forehead. ‘Sleep tight, and don’t turn your light on again the moment I’ve gone out of the room. And don’t sit reading on the windowsill, either.’
    And that was the end of that discussion.
    I walk over to the window. The bedroom overlooks the thinner L of the garden. There used to be a little pond here in which Max’s goldfish was reputed to live. Max had won it at a local fair and named it Looby Loo. As if in response to the ignominy of being named after Andy Pandy’s absurdly ineffectual sidekick, on release it had drifted passively out of its plastic bag and disappeared into the murky depths, not to be seen again. We would often sit by the pond, Max and I, poking holes in the emerald surface so viscous with pondweed and algae that the sticks could practically stand up on their own. Once, on a particularly warm evening, the fish – now about four times its original size – had risen slowly tothe surface like an ancient submarine, its bright orange fins leisurely parting the lush vegetation.
    ‘Oh, my God!’ Max stared first at the massive fish and then past me, his eyes wide with terror.
    ‘What?’ I panicked.
    ‘There’s an evil dwarf behind you.’
    I spun round, letting out a piercing squeal, and Max collapsed on the lawn. He only stopped laughing when I knelt on his chest and squeezed him very tightly around the neck.
    ‘All right! All right! It was just a joke,’ he gasped, struggling out of my grasp. ‘You shouldn’t watch The Singing Ringing Tree if it scares you so much.’ But each Thursday afternoon I would be drawn to the sofa to watch, appalled, as the terrifying events of the strange Eastern European fairytale unfolded in our sitting room.
    Throughout my life I have had a recurring dream. Out of a lightly swirling mist a lake rises and takes shape. The banks drip with ferns and lichen. From behind a rock, a dwarf peers, its goatlike eyes bulbous and unblinking. A pulse throbs angrily in its squat, thick-set neck. Its menacing fingers grip the wet stone, squeeze the dense, dark moss. The