Being Henry Applebee. Celia Reynolds

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      She lifted the back of her hair and fanned her neck with her hand. Estelle was busy serving a woman with a sleeping baby strapped to her chest. Linus, huddled deep in concentration in the corner, was adding the finishing touches to a homemade display case for a brand-new delivery of dowsing pendulums. Of the handful of regular customers swaying like reeds among the shelves, all Ariel could see were their arched, round backs.

      She blew a damp strand of hair out of her eyes and searched for Linus’s ancient Olympus behind the counter. The camera (her camera to be exact, now that she’d persuaded him to give it to her for her eighth birthday a few months earlier) was poised for action exactly where she’d left it the day before, on a concealed shelf below the till. She wanted to feel its sleek, black casing beneath her fingers and crouch down low like a photojournalist, whiling away the afternoon taking pictures of the tourists as they browsed, unsuspecting, among the stacks. White as death and slippery with factor fifty at the start of their holidays, by the end they’d be golden-fried and half a stone heavier from all the 99s, and the cockles and chips, and the drink.

      But today, nothing.

      Ariel trailed through the shop, along the cool, shady passageway leading to the back garden, and settled into a deckchair with a copy of The Adventures of the Wishing-Chair.

      ‘Hey, mind if I bring my coffee and join you?’ Frank shouted from the attic window. ‘It’s hotter than a Texan barbecue up here!’

      She looked up, saw a smiling face, a crisp white T-shirt, a swirl of glossy, jet-black hair, and waved to Frank to come down. She hoped he might be wearing his stage clothes, but so far he hadn’t worn them once during the day, not in the whole two weeks he’d been lodging with them, not unless he was on his way out to do a show. And yet Frank managed to look like Elvis no matter what he wore, with his jutting cheekbones, his immaculately sculpted sideburns, his perfect, china-white teeth. According to Estelle, Frank wasn’t far off Linus’s age, but Ariel thought he looked years younger. Linus was in his early fifties and already had grey hair.

      ‘The mercury’s gotta be well up over eighty today,’ Frank said as he launched his six-foot frame through the back door. He ran a hand through his quiff and reached for a pair of aviator sunglasses in his back pocket. ‘At least out here there’s a trickle of fresh air!’

      He crossed the lawn in four easy strides and lowered himself onto the grass next to Ariel’s chair. The turn-ups of his jeans rose to reveal a tattoo of an eagle on the inside of his left ankle. ‘I got that in Philly when I was eighteen,’ he said, rubbing his finger over the dull, black ink. ‘Thankfully, it’s pretty hidden away down there. I don’t like it so much any more.’

      Ariel smiled and stared at her reflection in the mirrored lenses of Frank’s sunglasses. Her face looked small and oddly distorted beneath the sunhat Estelle insisted she wore to keep the heat off the top of her head. Whenever she became too hot, her head began to pound and she broke out in a prickly red rash on her chest and arms. She wasn’t supposed to be sitting out here at all at this time of day, but she liked slipping on her yellow Woolworth’s sunnies and gazing up at the cloud formations sailing overhead. She was convinced there must be other people like her somewhere on the planet, daydreaming beneath the rolling, marshmallow sky. Sometimes she invented stories about who they were and where they were living. Sometimes she imagined them inventing stories of their own about her.

      Frank took a sip of his coffee and pointed a suntanned finger at her book. ‘Any good?’

      Ariel’s СКАЧАТЬ