Young People Know the Real Truth , livre ebook

Young people know the real truth
Two Young Adult novels by
Sam Eisenstein
Polly and Jaybird
Cold Moon and Hoot


Young people know the real truth
Published by The Conrad Press in the United Kingdom 2021
Tel: +44(0)1227 472 874 www.theconradpress.com 
 info@theconradpress.com
ISBN 978-1-839781-80-3
Copyright © Sam Eisenstein, 2021
The moral right of Sam Eisenstein to be identified as author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
All rights reserved.
Typesetting and Cover Design by:Charlotte Mouncey, www.bookstyle.co.uk
The Conrad Press logo was designed by Maria Priestley.


To all the people who love animals, particularly the stray and elderly


Polly and Jaybird


1
I n the dark, Polly reached out and grabbed Jaybird’s wrist, squeezing it until he awoke, yelling ‘Ouch!’
‘Jaybird, it was beautiful, I could see perfectly.’
‘You could see what? You know you hurt? Couldn’t you wait til tomorrow? We’ve got to be in school in about three hours.’
Polly felt at the table next to her bedside. ‘Five hours and twenty four minutes. It was beautiful,’ she said, dreamily. She threw off her covers and sat down on the side of Jaybird’s bed.
He sighed. He knew she would tell him her dream no matter how long it took for her to get his attention. That was how you remembered dreams, by telling them or by writing them down, she told him. Since she would wake him up either way--telling or with the tap-tap of her Braille stylus, he settled down to listen.
‘Wait a minute, I’ve got to go to the bathroom,’ he muttered.
‘Well, hurry up and don’t forget to--’
‘For pete’s sake, you wake me up and then blame me in advance for forgetting to put the seat down. Tell Dad about it, I never forget. I have to fish you out when you get flushed down the john,’ he said as he plodded down the hall toward the bathroom.
‘I wasn’t going to remind you of that, it’s the--’
As the crash of a pail reverberated through the little house, their father flung open the door of the kitchen, where he sat in his wheel chair often through all the long hours of the night, and yelled: ‘Can’t you kids ever give me any peace? You both want a couple belts?’
‘Sorry Dad,’ Polly said, no fear in her voice.
Jaybird said nothing, but he whispered, when he got back to the bedroom, ‘He wasn’t asleep. He’s never asleep. What’s he so bent out of shape about?’
‘He could have run into it.’
‘So what, he can’t fall down in a wheel chair.’
‘You left it there,’ Polly said. ‘What if I had bumped into it?’
‘You never do. Dad can’t, and you don’t, I’m the only clumsy one.’
Polly gave Jaybird another squeeze, not so hard, to let him know she thought he was fine, and to prepare him to listen to her dream.
‘Mother was here,’ Polly said softly. ‘She told me--she was wearing the beautiful sari, and--’
‘What’s a sari?’
‘It’s a kind of Indonesian wrap-around sort of dress and it’s dyed beautiful colors like a rainbow and it shines and shimmers as you walk around in it. She flew in through the open window and the curtains flapped on both sides and curved back like the wake around the bow of a ship.’
Jaybird closed his eyes so as to become as close to what Polly was as she talked about their mother. Neither of them had ever seen her except in fuzzy black and white old photos in the dog-eared photo album that Jaybird described to Polly.
Polly took a deep breath. ‘She was beautiful, she was smiling.’
This was not news. Mother was always smiling and encouraging, not like the reality they lived with. They never told Dad the dreams about their mother. They were afraid he would find some way to stop them.
‘She came into the room and she was in the air. She looked around and she wasn’t happy with the way the room is furnished, so she smiled and everything changed. There were two new beds and the wardrobe wasn’t peeling in front anymore.’
‘No more splinters!’ Jaybird whispered enthusiastically.
‘And there was the softest rug you can imagine, thick, good-smelling, you could roll all over it.’
‘Did she bring a dog?’ Jaybird asked eagerly.
‘She didn’t,’ Polly said seriously, ‘but there was a hint, if we’re very good, if we help Dad out, and if we don’t make him blow up, she’d bring us one.’
‘Fat chance of that,’ Jay said with disgust. ‘Just breathing makes him mad.’
‘She said he’s very sad and lonely. We have to try to cheer him up.’
‘Will you kids shut up and go to sleep? I don’t want to have to wake you up tomorrow,’ came their Dad’s roar from the kitchen, as he pounded on the wall with his stick.
Jaybird sighed. ‘If Mom came just to lecture us on our behavior we could just as well have a visit from the social worker.’
They both giggled.
‘I’ll remember the dream now we’ve talked. I’ll tell you more about it tomorrow.’
They turned around to opposite sides of the room, Polly with her eyes open, the better to see her dream again, Jaybird with his closed, to help form into pictures what his sister told him.


2
I t seemed like about two minutes later that Polly was shaking Jaybird’s shoulder.
‘What’s the matter now?’ he muttered, ‘not another dream!’
‘No, silly, it’s time to get up.’
Jay couldn’t get used to it’s being time to get up in the dead of night just because it was winter.
He shivered. ‘Ten minutes more. Just the same time you stole from me last night because of your dream.’
‘My dream!’ and she stood up straight, her empty eyes looking intently at something only she could see. For a minute Jay went silent. He was amazed and in awe of his twin sister, who looked like him but was different in every other way. She stopped just as she was, her face glowing, when she was running a picture show in her head. He didn’t know whether in fact, she ran it, or whether it ran on its own time table regardless of Polly’s desire in the matter. But he knew that now she was not resisting it. She was seeing their mother again, maybe even more vividly than she had the night before. And as always, Jay waited for her to take his hand and describe it to him. He was amazed too that all of the colors, shapes and movements were descriptions he gave to her, and then she turned the raw material into beautiful stories that they could both enjoy.
As she didn’t say anything, Jay prompted her. ‘You were telling me that our mother’s got a job as a social worker in heaven.’
Polly grinned and slapped him lightly. ‘Things are going to get better. You wait and see if I’m right.’
In the bathroom Jay glanced around to see if everything was in place for Polly. She would find it all, but Jay didn’t like to cause her unnecessary work. The same was not true for his father, who spent his days and most of the night in his wheelchair. He would roar for Jay to bring him something Jay knew full well he would need.
Jay grudgingly filled the battered tea kettle with water from the leaking tap for his father, shuddering as he tried not to notice the cockroach scuttling away under the stove.
Dad yelled at him for stumbling on the pail, but he himself told Jay to put it there to catch the water dripping through the roof and ceiling. He sure knew when and where it was going to drip. Maybe that was one of the few good things about being glued to a wheelchair and always in the house, you became a kind of extension of it and you knew how it was going to react to things like rain. It had rained two nights before, but Dad only told him to put the pail there last night, and sure enough, an hour after the pail was in place, the drip started.
Jay paused in mid brush swing. That was the sort of thing Polly did too. Could it be that Dad and Polly were more alike than Polly and him? He felt his face blazing like when he had a sun burn.
Jealous. He was jealous, Polly would tell him. Sometimes he didn’t even need to have her around for her to tell him he was being silly or too hasty. She was in his head. Mom was in her head. Dad was--
Was too complicated. Too mean. Too ugly. Too insulting. Too lonely. He felt his own tears well up and he shook his head angrily and brushed his teeth fiercely. Why should I care about him when he never says a nice word to either of us?
The house rattled as the first of the garbage trucks rumbled past. Their house was on the street that was the direct route to the dump. The trucks sometimes left souvenirs of their passes through the more affluent parts of town--a rose bush branch with a rose or two still attached. Jay wondered how people who owned such beautiful things would throw them away like that. Sometimes Jay carefully cut away the faded flowers and gave Polly the good ones. She drank them in as though they were liquid. Jay described them, but when she talked about them later, Jay could hardly recognise the flower for the transformation in her mind’s eye.
Jay’s father made him sweep the street in front of the house twice a week to get rid of the less pleasant things that fell or blew from the trucks. After holidays Jay could hear them all night long as they whined in first and second gear up the hill to the dump, and then bumped and clattered down empty, as though chattering to each other after a hard job.
At least they were through for the day. It seemed to Jay he was never through. First, getting himself and Polly ready for school, but he also had to do chores for Dad. Then they had to catch the bus to go across town to the school that could accommodate Polly, the only one in town. They didn’t really accommodate her, they put up with her, Jay thought. Jay had had to fight with some guys who made fun of his blind sister. But that was over now. Nobody messed with Polly or him, but that also meant they spent a lot of time alone. He kept people away from his sister. Polly