Feather Boy. Nicky Singer

Чтение книги онлайн.

СКАЧАТЬ how it’s shaped – like the back leg of a dog. Personally, I think that would make for one pretty deformed dog. The passage goes twenty yards east, then right-angles north for ten yards, then sharp east again for another ten and finally sharp north before coming out into daylight under the arch of two Stanhope Avenue houses, which are joined at the second floor level like some architectural Siamese twins. Other people say the passage is called The Dog Leg because that’s what happens there. Dogs lift their legs. At the lamp-posts. If only they knew.

      There are two lamp-posts, not the concrete sort you see in ordinary streets, with the lozenge of orange light at the top, but ones that look as if they’ve come out of Narnia. Old-fashioned, fluted metal lamp-posts in pale green surmounted by hexagonal glass lamps which glimmer with that soft gas mantle light. Sticking out horizontally, just below the lamp itself, is a fluted green metal arm with a bobble on the end, which looks like a place you might hang a coat if you were given to hanging your coat on a lamp-post. Alternatively, if you were given to climbing lamp-posts this would be an excellent place to sit. It’s where Niker sits. Niker climbs like a spider.

      I didn’t see him the first time, even though he was directly in front of me. I suppose that’s because I was going along with my head at the five-foot level and he was perched another five foot above that. So when the first apple landed I thought it was just Norbert bad luck. Because, as it happens, there is this large Bramley apple tree on the first bend of the passage. In any case I wasn’t exactly thinking of apple as ammunition, just apple as fruit, and fruit does occasionally fall off trees and hit people on account of the laws of gravity. So it was only when the second apple landed, squidgy and rotten and directly on my head, that I thought to look up. Or maybe it was the laugh that made me look. He’s quite a good marksman, Niker, and I think he hit me another four times before I managed to turn the corner. Afterwards, as I scraped the gunge off my coat with a stick, I wondered why I hadn’t thought to return fire. But I think I would have missed anyway.

      Of course the next time I went via The Dog Leg I checked the lamp-post (which you can see from the entrance) before going in. Only that time he was up the second lamp-post, the one you can’t see until you turn the middle bend. This post doesn’t have a convenient apple tree near by. So he had a plastic bag. He was wearing gloves and he threw something loose and brown that splatted on the back of my neck. I thought it was mud – until I breathed in. When I got to school I washed it out of my hair, but the smell was still on my collar.

      “Norbert,” Niker said at Break. “Did anyone ever tell you, you stink?” He was sitting on the playground wall next to Kate, who was swinging her legs and eating a cheesestring. “You should take a bath.” He jumped off the wall into a puddle, soaking me, but also himself.

      “E-jit,” Kate said and laughed.

      As soon as I got home that afternoon I changed and stuffed my shirt at the bottom of the laundry basket. But Mum has a nose like a bloodhound.

      “What happened?” she asked.

      “I fell over.”

      “On your back?”

      “Yes.”

      “In a pile of dog muck?”

      “Yes.”

      “Robert?”

      “Yes, Mum, I fell over on my back. In a pile of dog muck. People do, you know.”

      As I bathed, I thought about what Kate meant by “E-jit”. Or rather – who she meant. I decided she meant Niker and that’s why I didn’t stop using The Dog Leg. Not then anyway. No. I walked through it every day. Right up until the Grape Incident.

      I’m not saying I wasn’t scared. The Dog Leg’s a spooky place anyway. Mum says it’s not mortar that holds the walls together but graffiti. And the more often our neighbours creosote their back gates the more elaborate the spray painting gets. It makes the houses looked marked, as if all the victims from the Great Plague ended up with homes backing on to the Cut. And then there’s the broken glass and the smell of urine – and I don’t mean dog urine either. Because dog urine doesn’t smell, does it? And even though the passage is a perfectly ordinary path made of perfectly ordinary concrete, footfalls really echo there. There always seems to be someone behind you, or coming towards you. It’s difficult to locate exactly where someone else is in the passage until you’re right on them. Or they’re on you. But then it should be safe because so many people use it: dog-walkers, shoppers, business people on their way to the sandwich shop, everyday grown-ups going about their everyday business. So maybe it is only me that smells fear there.

      The apple-throwing happened in the autumn. And it wasn’t until the summer that Niker devised the grape thing. There were two new boys in class that term, Jon Pinkman and Shane Perkiss, Pinky and Perky, and he did it to them too. So it wasn’t just me. I wasn’t the only one. Pinky only stayed one term.

      Anyway, I don’t want to talk about that now. I just want to explain why it is that I head south today – towards the sea – instead of east towards school. It’s one of about seven routes I use. I never decide in advance which way I’m going to go on the basis that Niker still manages to intercept me on an unnerving number of occasions, so he either has to be psychic or he’s put some sort of implant in my brain. If it’s the implant then I reckon he can’t know where I’m going until I know where I’m going, so the later I decide the less time he has to get there before me. You could call it paranoid, but then anyone whose been through The Dog Leg with Pinky and Perky and a bunch of grapes has the right to be paranoid.

      I make my route decision the moment I let the back-gate latch fall. Click – I’m going to the sea. Click – I’m going past the Library. Only, to be honest, I do choose the sea more often than the other routes, because I love the sea. Especially in winter. Sometimes, when it’s really rough, the sea throws pebbles on to the promenade, and walking there is like treading on fists.

      Today I choose the sea, but I don’t go as far as the prom, just down to the main road (where I stand a moment to look at the colour of the waves) before turning inland again. It doesn’t really matter which of the northerly roads I take, Occam, The Grove, St Aubyns, they all arrive pretty much at the gas works and then it’s just a few hundred yards to school. Today I select St Aubyns, which is a wide, ugly street with gargantuan four-floor buildings, most of which have now been turned into guest houses. One of them is called the Cinderella Hotel. It has a flight of ballroom-type steps up to its huge front door. And I’m looking, as I always do, for the glass slipper, when my eye is drawn to the building next door. It’s a colossal edifice, grim, square, semi-derelict. And, painted in gold on the glass above the boarded front door, are these words: Chance House, 26 St Aubyns.

      I read the words and then I read them again. After which I shut my eyes, turn a full circle, and open my eyes again. The words are still there. As they must have been every one of the hundred times I’ve walked up this street.

      “You can go there. Walk. It’s not far.”

      And of course I know it’s Edith Sorrel’s house because it is precisely what I have been expecting. It’s the place I saw before I slept last night, the one I pretended to imagine. The one I knew was here but, perhaps, would rather not have known, which is why I suppose I chose to hear Edith Sorrel say “St Albans” when her clear-as-a-bell voice actually said, “St Aubyns”.

      Do you sometimes feel drawn and repelled in the same moment? I call it the car-crash mentality – you don’t want to look but you just can’t help yourself. Even though you know you are going to see something appalling. Well, Chance House is my car crash. I’ve tried ignoring it but it won’t go away. So now I’m going to have to look. СКАЧАТЬ