Читать книгу The Chicken Gave it to Me - Anne Fine - Страница 10

Gemma read faster than Andrew. By the time he reached the bottom of the page, her eyes were already on him.

‘What do you think?’

He twisted his face into a worried frown. He was about to speak, she knew. But then he just shook his head. He couldn’t find the words.

‘You think the chicken might have come from one of the farm sheds you pass on the way to school, don’t you?’ said Gemma. ‘I didn’t know the place had a name.’

Andrew turned back a page.

‘Harrowing Farm . . .’ he read aloud. ‘Funny name.’

‘Not funny,’ said Gemma. ‘That’s just what harrowing doesn’t mean.’

‘Harrowing means raking,’ Andrew corrected her. ‘A harrow is a tool that breaks up lumps in the soil.’

Now it was Gemma’s turn to correct him.

‘When we went to London,’ she told him, ‘my dad wouldn’t let me go in the Chamber of Horrors. He said it would be too harrowing.’

Andrew lifted his desk lid and rooted in the mess till he found his dictionary.

‘Harpoon . . . harpsichord . . . harridan . . .’ His finger slid down the side of the page. ‘Here we are. Harrowing.’

She leaned across, but he lifted the book and turned to face her so she couldn’t see. She just had to listen to him reading it.

‘Harrowing: breaking the clods in soil; or: terribly upsetting and distressing.’

Gemma ran her finger over the rough edge of the sacking cover.

‘So which do you think they meant?’

‘Maybe they meant both.’

‘Oh, Andrew! Surely not! Farms aren’t . . . Farms shouldn’t be . . . Why, everyone knows that farms are . . .’

Even before her voice trailed away, she was out of her seat and over to the bookshelf. Her fingers ran across the spines of the books as she read the titles aloud:

‘Life in the Arctic . . . China . . . Pterodactyls . . . Meet the Stone Age People . . . On the Farm. Here it is!’

She pulled out On the Farm. The book was for younger children really, but since the pictures were bright and clear, and there was quite a lot of information in it, their teacher had left it in the class library instead of sending it back to the Infants.

Gemma opened the pages at random. The pig was rooting contentedly with its snout in a frosty tussock of grass. The cow stood beside her calf, nudging her affectionately out of the ditch beside the hedge. In the soft summer evening sunlight, the hen ran happily round the orchard with her chicks.

‘Well!’ Andrew said. ‘The farm doesn’t look like that. It never has.’

Andrew should know. He’d walked past every day since he was five. There were no orchards, no hedges, no ditches, not even any tussocks of grass. There was fencing – miles of it to keep people out, and the land behind lay as flat and boring as a huge square of giant’s knitting. When Andrew thought about it, he realised he only knew it was a farm at all because he had been told. You never saw an animal as you passed by. All you saw standing in rows on the far side were six great long brown sheds.

‘The sheds! They’re not at all like the ones in this book.’

He pointed to the page with the picture of the pig. The shed behind stood crooked, with a drooping roof. Some of the tiles had slipped, leaving holes over the slats. The door hung on one hinge. And all around lay stones from a low wall outside that had tumbled down long ago.

And everywhere was green. Green, green, green, green. The shed was drowning in green – strangled with brambles, choked with weeds, surrounded by nettles, crowned with moss.

‘You could muck about in that shed for hours. Days! Weeks! Years!’

‘No wonder the pig looks happy . . .’

She sounded so wistful. Andrew looked up and saw she was gazing out of the window. She couldn’t see the farm from here. But he knew from the look on Gemma’s face that she had it in mind – the locked gate and the endless wire, the rows of huge brown sheds.

Suddenly the blood rushed to her cheeks. She stabbed the brightly coloured book fiercely with her finger.

‘If it’s not true,’ she cried, ‘if it’s not like this, why do people give us these books? Why do they try and trick us into thinking everything’s fine and hunky-dory? This book is as bad as a lie! So why do they do it?’

Andrew prised her stiff, angry finger off the page of On the Farm before she made a hole. Then he turned the next page of the book the chicken gave him.

‘Maybe,’ he said, ‘they don’t want you to think about it.’

They read on.