LITMIR.BIZ

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the skin that covered the bulging eyes of the dead fledgling he had found one evening below the gutter of the scouts’ hall. Mr Gardiner sat so close that his feet jammed against Alexander’s underneath the bench. ‘Johnny was a disruptive influence. You have the makings of a good scout,’ he said. ‘I’ll keep my eye on you,’ Mr Gardiner smiled, and an odour of sour milk escaped from his mouth. It was that evening, in the week that the last London tram broke down on its final journey to New Cross, that Alexander told his parents he did not want to go back.

      ‘Why on earth not?’ asked his father, folding the map that had been spread open on his lap.

      ‘It’s dull,’ said Alexander.

      ‘Dull,’ echoed his father dully.

      ‘Really dull.’

      ‘It’ll do you good if you stick at it.’

      ‘But it’s so boring.’

      ‘Any training’s boring sometimes.’

      ‘This isn’t training for anything, and it’s boring all the time.’

      ‘So it wasn’t boring when John Halloran was with you, but now it’s boring all the time?’

      ‘Yes.’

      ‘Sounds to me as if you weren’t there for the right reason in the first place.’

      ‘And we’ll have to get him the uniform soon, if he keeps going,’ said Alexander’s mother. ‘The uniform’s expensive, Graham.’

      ‘We’ve discovered that today, have we?’ his father rejoined.

      ‘No. Alexander has discovered that it’s not for him. That’s what we’ve discovered.’

      ‘There would seem to be little purpose in continuing this discussion,’ said his father, raising the map. He was still reading it, as if it were a device to preserve his annoyance, when Alexander came downstairs to say goodnight.

      ‘What’s the map for, Mum?’ Alexander asked.

      ‘A graphic representation of the land, for the purposes of comprehension and navigation,’ replied his father. His left hand let go of the map, stirred the spoon in his mug of cocoa, and took hold of the map again.

      ‘Graham,’ said his mother. She closed the fashion magazine in her lap and stared at the map, waiting for it to be lowered. ‘Graham,’ she said again, and his father made busy humming noises. His mother made a loudhailer from the magazine and directed it at Alexander. ‘He’s planning our holiday,’ she whispered loudly. ‘A proper holiday.’ ‘Possibly,’ responded his father.

      ‘Two whole weeks,’ said his mother, making delighted eyes.

      ‘Possibly. If the piggy bank has put on enough weight.’

      ‘In sunny Cornwall.’

      ‘Don’t count your chickens.’

      ‘Next month.’ ‘Possibly,’ his father repeated, but there was now a sardonic inflection to his gruffness.

      ‘Graham,’ said his mother. ‘Come on, Graham. Don’t be a grump.’

      ‘A grump?’ said his father, feigning bafflement. ‘A grump? Come,’ he called, and when Alexander came around to the side of his chair his father reached out to fold down the collars of his dressing gown and pyjamas, feigning displeasure at Alexander’s disarray. ‘X marks the spot,’ he said, scribbling with the mouthpiece of his pipe on a long stroke of yellow ink. ‘Praa,’ he read. ‘Possibly Praa.’

      Alexander looked at the bite-shaped bays and the roads that ended short of the coast, like wires that had been cut. ‘Next month?’ he asked his father.

      ‘I should think so,’ his father said. ‘Let’s see.’

      Every night until the day they left Alexander lay in bed at night, recalling the enormous dunes that Jimmy Murrell had seen, and the glowing sea, and repeating the strange bleat of a word, ‘Praa, Praa.’ He tacked the map to the back of his door, and drew a bull’s eye around the beach. He would always remember staring at the pencilled ring, as if into the entrance to a tunnel that led to a place that was unlike any he had seen before, and he would remember standing at the window of the train carriage and asking his father to name a distant town that came into view as the trees fell away from the railway line, and being pleased that his father could not name it, because this meant they had reached a region that was mysterious to all of them. He would remember the trees becoming stunted and the fields bigger, and his expectation that every vague, flat vista would come into focus as the sea, and his disappointment when one far-off field did indeed become the ocean, making its appearance as though by subterfuge. He would remember that the windows of the bus they boarded in Penzance were greasy with sea-spray, and that when his father asked for three tickets to Germoe, the conductor said something that his father could not understand, which made his mother hold Alexander so tightly he could feel her ribs vibrating with pent-up laughter. And he would remember the bus doors smacking open, and there were the houses of Germoe, all low and white, as if salt had caked every one of them.

      In Mrs Pardoe’s dining room they ate mackerel that Mrs Pardoe’s son had caught, and then they walked down to the beach in the last minutes of dusk. They passed a castle and a lorry carrying steel churns as big as pillar boxes. Flowers of a sort that Alexander had never seen before overflowed from a barrel. The vinegary smell of the beach grew stronger, and the road began to go under a skim of sand that had cigarette butts and lollipop sticks in it. Taking one hand each, his parents swung him over a long bolster of sand and he sprinted away, down to the water. Though the dunes were smaller than he had imagined they would be, he was thrilled by what he saw. This was not a sea like the sea near London: here was the ocean, a wilderness of immeasurable dark water. Looking towards the black horizon, he imagined that the night was not falling but was rising from the sea. Low in the sky a single yellow star could be seen, above a boat that seemed to dissolve into the clouds as he watched. All he could hear was the ceaseless gasping of the surf, and when he breathed deeply the air from the sea made a column he could feel in his throat. In his exhilaration he gathered a handful of soft dry sand and threw it onto the breeze.

      His mother’s hand, cooler than the air, made a band around his brow. ‘We’ve a surprise, Alexander,’ she said, and she turned him to face her.

      ‘Yes, we’re going straight back to London,’ said his father with a straight face, buttoning his jacket.

      ‘Mr and Mrs Beckwith are here, and Megan as well,’ his mother told him. ‘Two weeks they’ll be here, same as us.’

      A man and a woman were coming onto the beach; Alexander watched them approach until it was clear that they were not the Beckwiths. ‘They’re here already?’ he asked his mother warily.

      ‘Yes. They arrived yesterday.’

      ‘We thought you might be pleased,’ said his father in such a tone as to make it seem that the Beckwiths’ presence was a gift that it was in his power to revoke.

      ‘No, I am, I am,’ said Alexander. ‘Where are they?’ he asked.

      His mother pointed up the hill. ‘Over there somewhere.’

      ‘Hendra,’ confirmed his father. ‘A place called Hendra.’

      The white walls had turned the colour of mackerel in the thickening darkness, and here and there a lighted window shone, tantalizing as the windows of an Advent calendar. A car’s headlights tilted down from the top of the hill and brushed along the houses, as if inviting Alexander to guess which one was home to the Beckwiths.

      ‘We’ll see them tomorrow,’ said his mother. ‘Next thing you know we’ll all be together.’

      In the back bedroom of Mrs Pardoe’s house Alexander slept with his window open, listening to the sea at its nocturnal work, imagining that Megan was listening to it too, in her room somewhere up the hill, in a village with a name like a girl’s name. And in the morning,

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