Feather Boy Read Online Free

soldiers. Which, as it happens, I do. That was a little while after the Grape Incident. Which took place in The Dog Leg. Anyway, I didn’t tellMum anything about anything. But she’s not stupid. She’d watched me avoiding The Dog Leg, even though it’s the quickest way to school. And one afternoon she asked:
    “Is someone on your back?”
    “No.”
    “Someone bullying you?”
    “No.”
    “Do you want to invite anyone home for tea?”
    “No!”
    “If someone’s on your back,” she said, “you can always try to make a friend of them. Ask their advice. Get them to help you with something. Invite them home. It sometimes helps.”
    “Right.”
    How come grown-ups are always so smart about your life, but not quite so smart about their own? Slap, slap, slap. That was Dad hitting her on the landing. Well, hitting her on the face actually, out on the landing. Or maybe on the shoulders. I didn’t really want to look. I could hear plenty enough. Anyhow, I didn’t notice her trying to make him into a friend next morning.
    So what happens? Niker comes home. I didn’t think for a moment he’d accept the invitation. In fact,it took me three weeks to pluck up courage to ask him, and even then I had to write the time and date down and pass it to him like some secret note. I thought he’d laugh. But he just looked at me and said: “Yeah. Why not.” Of course Mum had planned to be there, but she hadn’t reckoned on a juggernaut jackknifing on the A23 and ploughing into six other vehicles. Like every other member of nursing staff in Sussex, she was called into Accident and Emergency. So when we got home there was a note on the table and a lasagna in the oven. Niker doesn’t like lasagna.
    “No computer and no food,” said Niker. “On the other hand – no parents.”
    I had never intended to show Niker the lead soldiers – the ones that were my father’s when he was a child. Dad had bought them in Willie Sureen, Sloane Street, with his own pocket money on one of the rare occasions he’d accompanied my grandfather on business to London. No more than half a thumb high, each man is intricately cast, from the sharp tip of his spear to the insignia on his tricorn or the buttons on his spats. Highlanders of the ’45 rebellion who died at Culloden, French officers who fought against Wolfe in Canada in the Seven Years War, a single Grenadierguard on his knees with a bayonet, a little drummer boy. Each delicately painted in Humbrol enamel, every silver belt buckle, cross-gartered stocking, black sporran tassel executed perfectly, every soldier a tribute to the skill of my father, who has such large, ungainly hands.
    No, I never meant to show Niker these soldiers, which I keep wrapped in tissue paper in the Huntley and Palmer Superior Reading Biscuits tin in which Dad presented them to me on my eighth birthday. I intended to show him the small, less detailed plastic models, also my father’s, from the American War of Independence. Cavalry, artillery, foot soldiers, painted more sporadically by Dad, and left in their grey or blue plastic for me to finish. And painstakingly, with my sable brushes and thinners, I have been finishing them. The rifles of these soldiers are flexible, durable, whereas the smallest, most accidental, tweak can snap the sword of one of the lead soldiers.
    So there they were that day, the plastic models, on my desk. The horses, the riders, the gun carriages, the infantry and even one or two odd cowboys, a belly-scuttling Indian, a First World War soldier, titbits to entice. And the paint of course. And the brushes. I knewit was a risk. But that was what I was doing – risking.
    Niker scanned my room. “What’s in that tin?”
    The Huntley and Palmer tin. Had I been looking? How could he possibly have known? Why hadn’t I hidden it, stashed it under the bed, secreted it in Mum’s room?
    “What tin?”
    “This tin.”
    I feel cold even now when I think of him opening it. His hands on the stiff,