Читать книгу The Pimlico Kid - Barry Walsh - Страница 6

Taunton 20 miles. The road sign slips past and another, listing local villages, glides towards me. One name stands out like my own on a guest list. A door into the past swings open and releases a locked-away ache. The car slows, behind me a horn blares. I pull into a lay-by.

Lower Sinton: part of an address written above two kiss crosses on a sheet of lined paper. I have never been here but I know it from what she told me: narrow lanes of pale yellow cottages; black window boxes crammed with flowers; main street pavements that rose three feet above the road. Her grandmother’s house stood next to the village post office and in the road outside her father’s black Humber gleamed. Beyond the back garden lay the wide meadow and further still there was the river. She spent her holidays here: where the sun always shone. When she returned to London, I marvelled at her golden skin and the extra light that had crept into her hair. It’s what happened in Somerset. It should have been Summerset.

I close my eyes. Back they come. First, as always, her face: bright, elfin, thanks to a short hairstyle, known at the time as Italian Boy. Beside her, my friend is making a circle with thumb and forefinger to tell me that everything is OK. And the other girl, with shining blue eyes, is hiding a smile behind her hand.

Scar reverts to wound. I tell myself, again, that we were children; that we couldn’t have prevented what happened; that when the most we might have been expected to deal with was a first kiss or a dying grandparent, we were undone by love itself, and violence – and that adults betrayed us.

Childhood love can endure but childhood promises are hard to keep.