Feather Boy Read Online Free Page A

slightly rusty lid. Him pulling and peering and me just standing there. The tissue was discoloured, brittle.
    “What have we here, Norbert?”
    He drew out a Highlander, red jacket, green kilt, tam-o-shanter, a running man, heels kicking, thin bladed bayonet to the fore.
    “Jeez,” said Niker, looking at the exquisitely painted criss-cross leg garters, “did you do this?”
    “No, my dad.”
    “It’s good.” And he put the soldier down, turned it gently this way and that, admired it. “Very good.”
    He unwrapped and looked at every soldier in the same way, taking time and care, asking me what I knew about the uniforms.
    Two hours later Mum found us both sitting at my desk, paint brushes in hand. The lasagna, which I’d forgotten to turn down, was burnt, but there were fifteen chestnut horses with black bridles, blue saddle-cloths and fifteen horse stands. Niker had painted mud and grass on his stands. And also flowers.
    Mum’s smile was so broad. But premature. Nothing changed at school. In fact it remained so much the same I sometimes think that Niker never came to my house at all. But then I sometimes think that my father, with those heavy hands, could never have painted the Highlanders. And he did.
    So here I am again, sitting at my desk with the smell of turps about me and thinking about Niker because it’s preferable to thinking about what I’m actually thinking about. Which is Chance House.
    You know how it is when there’s something niggling you, and you do your best to refuse it, chain it up in some dark and faraway place, only to have it come yap yap yapping back at you like some demented dog? Well, yap yap yap, here it comes again. Chance House.
    “You can go there. Walk. It’s not far.”
    I’m really not painting. I’m just waving a brush about. So I might as well – yap yap – go downstairs and getMum’s road atlas. This is how she finds me, crouching over England with a piece of string in my hands.
    “Geography prep?” she asks, practical as ever.
    “Yap.”
    “What is it?”
    “Distance in miles from here to St Albans. How far do you reckon, Mum?”
    “You’re the one with the string.”
    “Right. Fine. Ninety miles. Would it be ninety miles?”
    “Sounds about right.”
    “Could we go there?”
    “Why?”
    Good question.
    “Day out?”
    She sits down, kicks off her shoes and puts her feet up on a little pouffe.
    “Bit far for a day out,” she says. My mum is a small person, with a small face and a little puff of blonde hair. She looks exhausted.
    “Can I get you a cup of tea?”
    “God bless you, Robert.”
    It’s only teabag tea but, the way she takes it, it could be water in a desert.
    “I’d really like to go to St Albans. In fact, I think I have to go to St Albans.”
    She shuts her eyes.
    “Do you think we could?”
    “Mmm.” She’s asleep. I lift the teacup from her lap. Where her skirt has ridden up I can see blood throbbing in her varicose vein.
    In the kitchen I make myself a sandwich and then I return to my desk.
    “It’s really not far,” yaps Edith Sorrel.
    That’s when I decide to set the dream alarm. It’s not an exact science but it sometimes works for me. All I have to do is think about whatever it is that’s bothering me and then set the alarm for 3am. I’ve tried many different times of night but all my best results have come from 3am. Too early in the night and my dreams don’t really seem to have got going, too near the morning and they seem to be petering out. At 3am, I’m normally in the middle of some seething epic. As soon as the alarm goes, I start scribbling. I write down everything I can remember in my dream diary. Even the stupid and inconsequential stuff. Mainly that actually. I note all the colours, the people, the buildings, the looks, thefeelings. But I don’t try to make sense of anything. In any case there often isn’t much sense to be made. But in the morning it’s different. Once or twice I’ve woken with some