Ten Days Read Online Free Page B

you’d been marked, not until they flash you with an infrared gun and your hand lights up like it’s Christmas. Sticks to your skin for a week – fuck knows what chemicals have ate into you in the meantime. No washing it off neither. That’s why we’re wearing gloves in this fucking heat.’
    â€˜What happens if somebody touches it by mistake?’
    â€˜No chance of that. We’re gonna glass it in and then embed the post in concrete – the lawn is history. And after that we’ll fence the lot in.’
    â€˜That’s overkill, isn’t it?’
    â€˜You think so? It’s the badlands around here, and from what we’ve heard it’s only going to get badder.’ He grimaced. ‘Now, if you don’t mind, we have to get on.’
    She left them to it, walking along the High Street until she turned off to go down the market. There the ice was melting almost as fast as the fishmongers could lay it down, so that water was dripping off the trays onto the pavement and into the gutters, flavouring the air with the stink of fish. Careful to hold her skirt up, she stepped onto the pavement and kept going, passing a pound shop, one of three along the parade. She stopped by a display of plastic boxes of various sizes, and mops and brooms that had spilt out onto the pavement and almost into the road.
    â€˜Jayden?’
    Jayden, who had been picking up the fallen brooms, looked up. A taciturn boy, he nodded to her.
    â€˜You were out early this morning.’
    He shrugged and said something that sounded like ‘I dunno.’
    â€˜Not at school?’
    He shook his head and didn’t speak, but whether this was because he was truanting and didn’t want to say so, or because he couldn’t summon up the energy for an explanation, she couldn’t tell.
    â€˜Come and have some cake with us after your tea.’
    â€˜Okay,’ he said. And gave a little smile. Which she knew was the best she was going to get out of him.
    She moved on only to stop again at the last shop in the run. It wasn’t her favourite, but it was the cheapest. She reached over the display of peppers and okra and tomatoes to the plantain at the back. She had just picked up a piece when a voice sounded in her ear: ‘That plantain’s tired.’
    She looked up and straight into the sun, so that all she first saw against the dazzle was a dark shape. She took a step back, blinked and her vision cleared: ‘Banji. You scared me.’
    He smiled and his eyes crinkled. Which she’d always liked. She smiled back.
    He took the plantain she’d been reaching for, turning it over to expose a bruised underside. ‘If you have to shop here, you’ve got to shop clever.’ He put the piece back and picked through the pile. ‘This one’s fresher.’
    As she took it from him, his other hand touched and held hers.
    â€˜You’re so cool,’ she said.
    â€˜I was born cool.’ He smiled again.
    They stood for a moment not speaking, and she thought how mismatched they – a stout white woman and a tall black man, standing close – must look, and then she thought that she should take back her hand.
    She didn’t want to.
    â€˜How was Lindi this morning?’ he said.
    â€˜Disappointed you weren’t there. And stroppy as hell.’
    â€˜Can’t imagine where she gets that from.’ Another smile as he increased his pressure on her hand.
    She looked down at his long brown fingers with their broad square-cut nails and the back of his hand with its raised veins. She saw her own hand in his, plump and white, as he continued, gently, to squeeze it.
    It was fifteen years since he’d left, and his going had been so brutal and so final she’d neither expected to see him again nor hoped that she might. But now she found herself in the grip of some of the feelings she had thought long gone. He’s playing me, she told herself. And