The Travellers and Other Stories Read Online Free Page B

underneath a pillowcase, I have hidden a set of Tom Ellis’s clothes. One of his knitted long-sleeved shirts and a pair of his soft homemade trousers. They still have his sweet fresh smell in them. They are neatly folded and ready to put on.
    For some time now I’ve been avoiding my mother because of her trick of looking inside me. She’s been looking at me in quiet moments of the day when Dad is asleep and Tanya is out. When she thinks I’ve been sitting too long without saying anything, she comes up to me and touches my cheek with the back of her hand.
    I never planned to steal the clothes, and, really, it’s not that I’ve stolen them, it’s that he gave them to me and I’ve not given them back. A little while ago it was so hot one day after school that we went swimming in the black pond in the Dip at the bottom of town with all our clothes on. We had a bath at Tom’s house and he gave me a set of his clothes to wear.
    I don’t know if it was in my mind then to keep them, but I do know that when I put them on I didn’t feel like Flipper Harries any more.
    Yesterday I left a note in Angela’s desk. I didn’t sign it but I wrote it in Tom’s handwriting, the same writing I use when I do his schoolwork for him, with the tall t s and the round u s. I will be under the trees by the stream in the Dip tomorrow at nine o’clock. Please come.
    Undressing, I glimpse myself in the long wardrobe mirror, stooping over the clothes. It’s such a shock to see my old familiar body that I close my eyes against the sight of it and pull the knitted shirt over my head, but a cold skin has begun to close around my heart and before I know it the thought of Voyle Peg’s plastic leg is bringing a swelling into my throat, because even though Voyle is old and dying from the coal dust silted up in his yellow lungs, he can still stand on the pavement outside the Red Cow with the creases of his trousers breaking over his black shoes and no one would ever know there was a plastic leg hiding inside. He can go about with his peg between his shoe and his bum and if you didn’t know, you’d be completely fooled.
    But this feels to me like the only chance I’ll ever have. In ten minutes she’ll be there, searching in the dark for the bright white gleam of the stripes in Tom Ellis’s long-sleeved shirt.
    ‘David?’ calls my mother from the front room.
    I do tell her goodbye but I’m not sure if she hears. My voice comes out as a croak, and then I’m out the door into the night, the cuffs of his shirt tucked carefully into my belt.
    It’s so quiet here tonight, nothing but the shuffle of branches above my head, a slow dropping where the water slides into the black pond.
    Here she comes.
    A little way from me still, she stops, and seems to give her head a little shake. In the dark I can’t see her face, only the shimmer of her blouse. One of the empty sleeves has worked loose from my belt and in the cool breeze I can feel it wafting about, like a scarf.
    For a long frozen moment I stand with my eyes closed and pray for the thick waters of the black pond to rise up and swallow me whole.
    ‘You’re a daft idiot,’ she whispers, and laughs quietly into the darkness. There’s a soft cracking in the long grass beneath her feet, the cold touch of her hands under the woollen cloth of the perfumed shirt. She reaches up under the shirt and holds my face between her hands and kisses me on the mouth. Still holding my face, Angela Hansford pulls me down into the grass.
    Oh bloody hell. Oh Jesus Christ !
    MY NAME IS FLIPPER HARRIES AND I AM A GIFT FROM GOD!!!!!!!!!!!!

GINGERBREAD BOY
    I ALWAYS HOPED it wasn’t someone old who took Bobby. He was afraid of old people. He’d look at the yellow whites of their eyes and their ugly teeth and the shiny brown skin on their hands and then he’d push his face into Lily’s skirts and hide. He was afraid of old people and dogs and witches, though he was very fond indeed of fairy tales and I always