The Travellers and Other Stories Read Online Free Page A

been doing it, off and on, for ten years, ever since we were in class one and did Monday morning diaries. He could never think of anything to put, so I began taking things out of my life and writing them into his:
    On Saturday we went all the way to Porthcawl for Angela Hansford’s birthday. Flipper bought her a pet chicken for a present. Her dad has built a wooden hut for it in the back yard.
    A gypsy read Flipper’s fortune with a pack of greasy cards. He wouldn’t tell anyone what she said.
    Tom Ellis is probably the most beautiful boy who has ever lived.
    He has dark hair and dark skin and a narrow jaw and such a serious, almost stony expression that when he smiles it feels like a prize you have won.
    He’s tall and lean and there’s not one single girl in the entire valley who’s not in love with him. His mother accentuates his beauty with the clothes she gives him to wear, most of which she makes herself. She knits strange, striped shirts for him and washes them in Dreft so they always have a sweet fresh smell in them which I’ve come to think of as his smell. All of them are soft and fall in folds from his shoulders like the loose wrapping on a present. When the girls get half a chance, they stroke and tug at his shirts.
    It’s a mystery how anyone as fat and ugly as Annie Ellis could have produced someone like Tom. There’s something strange and foreign in his looks, his skin has a dry, dusty quality quite unlike the soft pale skin of the people here. He’s like a warm thing that’s fallen out of the sky into our damp little town. It’s impossible to think of him ever going underground and turning pale like the men here, and old before his time. I think that’s partly what the girls love about him, that he’s different, that he doesn’t seem to belong here. He’s like the bright vinyl paint the girls’ mothers put on their doors and window frames, Tango and Bermuda Blue, a bit of colour and excitement against the dark stone of the houses and the black of the mountain and the mine. He’s all the colour and excitement of their lives. When he and I are together, they follow us about like a plume of smoke, all watching and waiting to see who he’ll chose.
    On Wednesday evenings, I walk down the hill and slip inside the Co-op. If I’ve got some money I buy something, otherwise I pretend to be looking at the pyramids of John West salmon. I hang about as long as I dare, wanting to stay but also wanting to clear off before my loitering gets on Minty Clegg’s nerves—before she looks up from filing her dirty nails and mutters, ‘Fuck off, Flipper.’
    Minty Clegg works in the Co-op on Wednesdays after school with Angela Hansford. They both serve behind the counter and wear green nylon shopcoats.
    Minty Clegg is a stale-looking girl with sparse hair, and large, sharp teeth. She wears her shopcoat very short and has rough, blotchy legs. When Tom comes in she smiles, baring her sharp teeth and a pulse flickers in the hollow of her freckled throat above the cold zip of her shopcoat.
    Angela stays where she is behind the counter, watching too. She is quite small with short brown hair and I have been in love with her my whole entire life. I think if I could eliminate this one fact from my life, I could be happy.
    She lives three doors down from us. If I lean out of my parents’ window upstairs I can see the smoke from the Hansfords’ fire chugging out of the chimney. I can see a sliver of Angela’s bedroom window and sometimes a corner of her blue curtains blowing against the sill. The chicken I gave her for her fifth birthday died years ago but the wooden hut her dad built is still there in the yard. Tom has never told me what he thinks of her and I’ve never asked him.
    All I can think of is that he will chose her. These past months, I can feel how she’s begun to creep between me and Tom, something that rubs against us, like a tiny seed of tragedy.
    In the bottom drawer of the pine chest in my bedroom,