A Bit of Earth Read Online Free Page B

the Rev. W. Awdry for his plodding prose and plots, the engines’ banal expressions and characters. Sometimes Guy would think he was being cowardly, and failing Felix in what they were reading, but he would still stick to Felix’s choices. There was so much to be avoided. As they climbed the stairs at bedtime, and Felix brushed his teeth, the words
    James James

Morrison Morrison

Weatherby George Dupree

Took great

Care of his Mother,

Though he was only three …
    would sound so loudly in his head that he feared Felix might hear them. How could A.A. Milne have written such a poem? Huh, The wisdom of bloody Pooh.
    Then he thought, perhaps I’m doing this all wrong. Perhaps I should be choosing books that will make us cry. And there were many. At least when Felix was a bit older most parents in books would be dead, absent or dysfunctional. Guy reckoned that in books for seven-year-olds and above it was deemed to make for a better story. Bring them on!
    Lots of new books had arrived, and so had some puzzles, stickers and drawing things. Felix liked opening the presents, but he didn’t really want to read any of the new books. He liked his old books better. Some of the puzzles were tooeasy and some were a bit too hard. He hated it if people gave you things that were too hard and you were going to have to wait until you were older, or things that were too big that you had to grow into.
    One of the presents was a kit for making a dinosaur skeleton out of wood. His dad said that they would do it later, or another day. Felix was bored of always waiting. He pressed the pieces out all by himself. The trouble was that some of them had splinters, and then he couldn’t see how they all went together. He tried to build it, but it didn’t look much like a brachiosaurus. He thought that his dad might be cross that he hadn’t waited. He smashed it up and hid the bits in a bag under his bed. He had a go at drawing a brachiosaurus instead, but it kept going wrong. He tried out all the new pens, and then left their tops off to see if his dad noticed. He drew tiny pictures on the wall beside his bed. Dad didn’t even notice that either. The next day he put all the lids back on the pens because he didn’t really want them to run out. He watched videos. Dad didn’t mind if he watched them again and again.
    Guy tried to talk sense to himself. Terrible, stupid, random things happened. And one had happened to them. If Felix had been the one to die then at least Susannah and he could have swiftly killed themselves. Everything hung by a thread, all life, all happiness.
    Sometimes the thoughts bored him, but he could not stop them. He wondered whether anyone had ever managed any original thoughts when something like this happened to them.
    The world was full of stupid random events.
    He remembered a friend of Jenny’s who broke her neck when she slipped on a pencil, and a case he saw in the paper of some poor soul being accidentally electrocuted in a metal-walled public loo on a seaside promenade.
    Think of history, the untimely demise of so many kings and queens in so many ridiculous ways, to say nothing of all the millions of ordinary, undocumented people. Tennessee Williams choked to death on a bottle cap. Everything was an accident. One big cosmic accident. These sorts of things were to be expected. They fitted. In this universe, the nonsensical and the random were to be expected. They should not even be remarked upon.
    Guy hadn’t seen the piece on
South Today.
Somehow he was aware that there had been articles about the crash in the local paper, but he didn’t read them, and would never have deliberately kept them. Worst of all for Guy, there was an article in the university’s own glossy publication. A short account of what happened, then a long glowing obituary of Julius East. It seemed that he was a professor in his prime, with a long list of publications and contributions to text books