Lost in the Flames Read Online Free

won’t.’
    ‘I’ll tell father.’
    ‘Don’t you dare.’
    ‘Suit yourself …’
    And William left Jacob to it.
    Jacob took the garden canes that he had cut to the right length, and the light cloth he had filched over time from his mother’s pile in the top room, and he set about weaving them together with twine, thencoated the cloth with cow glue and edged the wings with long pheasant feathers and layered the rest with the ones from the chickens that he had plucked for Alfred. Then he fixed the leather straps that would go round his arms and hid the wings away behind the tool cupboard to dry. The next day he came back and closed the out-house door and winked at Eric and Penelope and took out the wings and slipped his arms into the straps and stood and flapped his arms and pressed his cheek into the feathers and looked up and grinned at his birds.
    ‘What do you think, Eric?’ he said. ‘Will they work?’
    Eric stared at him and cooed. Jacob cooed back.
    ‘Good, then,’ said Jacob. ‘I’ll let you know how I get on.’
    He crept out of the out-house and in through the kitchen door and up the stairs to the top room where the dormer window was. He hurried over to the window and pushed it open.
    ‘Jacob, bloody hell, don’t jump! I thought you were joking.’
    William had been sitting unseen, reading a book about tractors, looking at the pictures mainly.
    ‘Course I wasn’t joking,’ said Jacob. ‘Look at my wings. I’m going to fly.’
    And he began to squeeze himself out of the window. William rushed across and grabbed his arm and dragged him back in.
    ‘Get off my wing, you idiot! You’ll break it!’
    ‘Don’t be a fool, Jacob. Those wings are useless. You’ll drop like a stone.’
    ‘Get off me, they’re not useless, they’re bloody beautiful.’
    ‘Please Jacob,’ said William. Jacob had never heard his brother say please before. It caused him to pause. ‘Well at least don’t jump from the top floor. Try it from the room below. Please …’
    ‘All right then,’ said Jacob.
    He hurried off downstairs and heard his brother’s footsteps hurrying after him. Jacob perched on the sill and flapped his wings and cooed and cried out, ‘Look at me fly!’
    He flung himself out into space just as Alfred looked up from the orchard. Jacob felt the wind rush past him as the wings folded beneath his weight and he crashed down into the rose-bed where he lay impaled on the thorns and could see William’s little face looking down on him from the window above, a hand held against his brow, and as Jacob felt the pain in his ankle and the blood on his face, he saw Alfred toweringover him with a face fluttering somewhere between admiration and rage.
    ‘You bloody little fool,’ he said at last as he hauled his son from the thorns and went to call the doctor to cast the broken ankle in plaster.
    ‘How’s the ankle, little Icarus?’ Rose asked when she saw Jacob later.
    ‘Broken,’ he said. ‘Almost snapped in two.’
    ‘The shell must break before the bird can fly …’
    ‘Is that Chesterton again?’
    ‘No, that one’s anonymous. Does it hurt very much?’
    ‘Course not.’
    ‘Just as I thought,’ she said, and she stroked his hair and he smiled at her.
    ***
    Norman Miller lowered himself into the tepid waters of the cast-iron bath and a faint slick of grime slipped across the surface. With just his head and knees above the waterline, the smell of wet sheep seeped up into Norman’s nostrils and he ducked his head under the water, then out again, and lathered himself a wig of suds from the block of soap he kept in the drip-tray by the taps. He looked around at the damp brick walls and the single window in the far wall, with its Victorian glass and its bubbles and eddies and sand-speck imperfections. During the day it afforded a transparent view across the fields and at night a clear window onto Norman Miller in his bathroom birthday suit, but no one would be out there at this time, just