Читать книгу The 1,000-year-old Boy - Ross Welford, Ross Welford - Страница 19

The morning it all happened, Mam said to me, ‘Do you know what day it is today, Alve?’ She still called me by my birth name when we were alone, which was practically always.

I knew but I pretended not to, so that she would have the pleasure of reminding me.

‘Thirty years in Oak Cottage. Thirty years since we moved back into this house,’ and she smiled her gappy smile, and hugged me with her strong arms. ‘I do not want to move again. Not after the last time,’ she said for maybe the hundredth time.

In response, I forced a smile, and nodded, and did not remind her that the world was changing faster than ever.

Mam worried. We both did. Moving house, staying anonymous – living in general – was becoming harder and harder.

It had never been exactly easy. Mam and I, however, had always been quite mobile and we had found that there was always someone willing to rent us a small house, or even just a room; we kept our possessions to a minimum, or stored them elsewhere, especially our books.

But these days? These days, everybody wants to know everything about you. Rental agreements, bank accounts, licences for this, permits for that, forms to fill in, identification documents …

Mam seldom listened to the news on the wireless. It was, she would say, ‘too confusing’. I think she meant ‘too scary’. We had shut ourselves away for so long that Mam no longer understood the wider world of motor cars, jet aeroplanes, computers, mobile telephones.

But sometimes, when Mam was upstairs in bed, I would listen to the news. I would try to understand, and I would long to live in that world: the real world, with all of its wonders.

Mam tutted. ‘She is here again, Alve.’ She wiped her hands and peered out of the scullery window. ‘That is the second time this week. And there is someone with her. Over there on the left. Can you see?’

The ‘little nosy girl’ was what Mam called her. I now know her as Roxy Minto. Mam had initially seen her spying on us nearly a year earlier. At first Mam thought the worst – that it would be a repeat of the last time we had lived here, when the boys had made our lives a misery, and all the questions had started, and we had had to move away.

It turned out not to be that. All the little girl wanted to do was to watch. We would hear her, trying her best to be quiet in the bushes.

Until now she had always been alone. She would approach, and lie in the long grass in front of the gorse bush, and watch us go about our business. Then autumn came, and the leaves dropped, and she stopped coming because – I think – she would not be hidden so well.

It was annoying to be spied on, but better than the fear that we might be attacked, or accused of who knows what.

Witchcraft?

I know that no one is accused of witchcraft in the twenty-first century, but we have feared it for so long that our solitude became our life, and being anonymous our only goal.

And so we let her be. Then the spring came back, and the leaves, and so did the little girl in the bushes.

Mam went to the half-door that led into the backyard and squinted out. Once more she said, ‘I am not moving again, Alve. Not after the last time.’

The last time. I cannot forget the last time. Because the last time involved Jack, and Jack was the last friend I ever had.