The Story of Silence (Book 3)

Chapter 4

Somewhere not in Italy, that makes a change! Somewhere in America. Whoopee:

Silence woke in the morning with the sunlight streaming through the crack between his curtains and down onto his bed. By the clock on the chest of drawers next to his bed it was  seven thirty.

He found it strange to see he was in a new room by himself instead of sharing a large one with about ten other boys. It was a blue room with a white ceiling; it also had a fan hanging from the roof. Silence’s old room hadn’t had a fan, indeed the room back at the orphanage never needed one.

There was a desk on one side of the room facing the bed and a sliding door set into the wall next to it. The chest of drawers next to his bed had a lamp on it as well as the clock. He reached over and turned on the lamp, just to try it. There were two lights set into the roof of the room back at the orphanage, one on each side of the room that were both controlled by a switch near the door. Silence had never been allowed to flick it to turn the lights on, only the older boys or Father Demetre were allowed to. It cost money for power to run the lights he had been told. Needlessly turning the lights on and off wasted the power.

After turning the lamp off he pulled back the thick covers on his bed and rushed out of the room. No one else was up, that he could see anyway, and looking out from a window on the second floor he could see that the car that he had driven in last night wasn’t out front where his uncle had parked it. Silence wondered where it had gone, and if it meant that his uncle had left too.

He wandered silently back to his room and hopped back into his still warm bed. He lay there awake, just watching the door of his room and thinking about things.

About eight o’clock he heard someone get up and move downstairs, and then shortly there was the sound of dishes being moved around in the kitchen. Five minutes later a high female voice, which he took to be his Aunt Geraldine, called him down for breakfast.

He jumped out of bed again and climbed into some clean clothes before running downstairs again. He rushed to a stop just before he reached the kitchen and walked into it.

The kitchen was an open area with lots of room, and he found his aunt in a purple dressing gown fixing a breakfast of toast. She turned when he coughed and looked down at him, frowning in distaste.

Silence looked down at himself in worry and then back up at her. He’d wanted to make a good first impression, but it seemed that maybe arriving in the clothes that he’d picked hadn’t been a good idea.

But not wanting to seem rude by not saying anything, he pulled out his notebook and wrote a nice note about how it was a lovely morning and how it was nice to meet her, all in the hopes that saying nice things would mend the matter of his clothes. He handed the note to her with a smile.

She sniffed in more distaste as she took it between two bony fingers. She opened it gingerly, touching it as little as possible, and read it. She read the part where he called her aunt and sniffed loudly again, Silence wondered briefly if she had a cold.

‘My name is Mrs Geraldine Revine,’ she told him after placing the note down onto the kitchen bench. ‘You will call me Aunty Geraldine, never Mrs Revine or plain Geraldine, understood?’

Silence nodded his head.

‘Good. Now there’s cereal in the cupboard over there,’ she pointed to a cupboard on the other side of the kitchen, ‘you can fix what you want. I’m going to take my breakfast up to my room. When you are done, there is the sink and you will wash your dishes,’ she commanded. ‘Understood?’ Silence nodded again. ‘Good.’ With that she picked up her plate of toast and walked past him out of the kitchen.