The removal lorry shook itself into life, grated its gears, and lumbered down Kingfisher Meadows to the main road. Yasmin Morton-Bagot and Mum lugged a last box into Mum’s Datsun. Dad called Yasmin Morton-Bagot a Hooray Henrietta once, and maybe she is one, but Hooray Henriettas can be as tough as Hell’s Angels. Julia fitted a laundry basket, a wound-up washing line and a bag of pegs into Yasmin Morton-Bagot’s Alfa Romeo.
T minus five minutes, I reckoned.
The net curtain in Mr Castle’s bedroom twitched. Mrs Castle came close to the glass like a drowned face. She peered down at Mum, Julia and Yasmin Morton-Bagot.
What big eyes Mrs Castle has.
She felt me watching her and our eyes met. Quick as a minnow, the net curtain twitched back.
Julia received my telepathic signal and looked up at me.
I half waved.
‘I’ve been sent to get you.’ My sister’s footsteps clopped into my room. ‘Dead or alive. Could start snowing any minute. The radio said ice sheets and woolly mammoths are moving down the M5, so we’d better get going.’
‘Okay.’ I didn’t move off my window-sill perch.
‘Much louder without carpets and curtains, isn’t it?’
‘Yeah.’ Like the house hasn’t got any clothes on. ‘Much.’ Our quiet voices boomed and even daylight was a notch whiter.
‘I always envied you your room.’ Julia leant on my window sill. Her new hair suits her, once you get used to it. ‘You can keep an eye on the neighbours from here. Spy on the Woolmeres and the Castles.’
‘I envied you yours.’
‘What? Up in the attic like a Victorian pot-scrubber?’
‘You can see right up the bridlepath to the Malverns.’
‘When a storm was on I thought the whole roof was going to lift off, like in The Wizard of Oz. Used to petrify me.’
‘That’s difficult to imagine.’
Julia toyed with the platinum dolphin necklace Stian’d given her. ‘What’s difficult to imagine?’
‘Difficult to imagine anything ever petrifying you.’
‘Well, behind my fearless faµade, little brother, I am regularly scared witless by all manner of things. But how stupid of us. Why on earth didn’t we just swap rooms?’
The echoey house asked its far corners but no answer rebounded back.
Our right to be here is weaker by the minute.
Some snowdrops’d come out in the boggy spot, by Dad’s greenhouse. By Dad’s ex-greenhouse.
‘What was the name of that game,’ Julia stared down, ‘when we were kids? I described it to Stian. Where we’d chased each other round and round the house and the first one to catch up with the other won?’
‘“Round-and-Round-the-House”.’
‘That was it! Apt title.’ Julia was trying to cheer me up again.
‘Yeah,’ I let her think it was working, ‘and you hid behind the oil tank one time and watched me sprint past for thirty minutes like a total prat.’
‘Not thirty minutes. You caught on after twenty, at most.’
But it’s okay for Julia. On Monday her cool boyfriend will land in Cheltenham in his black Porsche, she’ll just hop in, and off they’ll zoom to Edinburgh. On Monday I’ve got to go to a new school in a new town and be the New Kid Whose Parents By the Way Are Getting Divorced. I don’t even have a proper uniform yet.
‘Jason?’
‘Yeah?’
‘Any idea why Eliot Bolivar stopped writing poems for the parish magazine?’
Just six months ago Julia saying that’d’ve mortified me, but my sister’d asked it seriously. Was she bluffing, to draw me out? No. How long’d she known? But who cares?
‘He smuggled his poems into that bonfire Dad lit for his Greenland paperwork. He told me the fire turned all his poems into masterpieces.’
‘I hope,’ Julia bit at a spike of fingernail, ‘he hasn’t given up writing altogether. He’s got literary promise. When you next run into him, tell him from me to stick at it, will you?’
‘Okay.’
Yasmin Morton-Bagot fumbled through her glove compartment and got out a map.
‘The weirdest thing,’ my fingers drummed the OXO tin, ‘is leaving the house without Dad. I mean, he ought to be running around now, turning off the boiler, the water, the gas…’ This divorce’s like in a disaster film when a crack zigzags along the street and a chasm opens up under someone’s feet. I’m that someone. Mum’s on one side with Julia, Dad’s on the other with Cynthia. If I don’t jump one way or the other I’m going to fall into bottomless blackness. ‘Checking windows, one last time, checking the lecky. Like when we went on holidays up to Oban or the Peak District or somewhere.’
I haven’t cried about the divorce once. I’m not going to now.
No bloody way am I crying! I’ll be fourteen in a few days.
‘It’ll be all right,’ Julia’s gentleness makes it worse, ‘in the end, Jace.’
‘It doesn’t feel very all right.’
‘That’s because it’s not the end.’
Acknowledgements
Thank you to Nadeem Aslam, Eleanor Bailey, Jocasta Brownlee, Amber Burlinson, Evan Camfield, Lynn Cannici, Tadhg Casey, Stuart Coughlan, Louise Dennys, Walter Donohue, Maveeda Duncan and her daughter, David Ebershoff, Keith Gray, Rodney Hall, Ian Jack, Henry Jeffreys, Sharon Klein, Kerr’s Bookshop in Clonakilty, Hari Kunzru, Morag and Tim Joss, Toby Litt, Jynne Martin, Jan Montefiore, Lawrence Norfolk, Jonathan Pegg, Nic Rowley, Shaheeda Sabir, Michael Schellenberg, Eleanor Simmons, Rory and Diane Snookes, Doug Stewart, Carole Welch and the White-Haired Lady of Hay-on-Wye who advised me to keep the rabbit, which nonetheless escaped from the final manuscript.
Special thanks to my parents and Keiko.
A distant ancestor of the first chapter appeared in Granta 81. A recent ancestor of the second chapter appeared in New Writing 13 (Picador). The fifth chapter was researched with reference to The Battle for the Falklands by Max Hastings and Simon Jenkins (Pan Books, 1997). The eighth chapter quotes from Le Grand Meaulnes by Alain-Fournier (Librairie Fayard, 1971). The ninth chapter quotes from Lord of the Flies by William Golding (Faber & Faber, 1954) with permission. The novel owes debts of detail to Andrew Collins’s memoir Where Did It All Go Right? (Ebury Press, 2003).
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