When the Night Comes Read Online Free Page B

as many as we could find, twenty or more, one by one, until all around us were opened walnut shells in perfect halves.

THINGS I LOVE
    W e didn’t have a lawn mower. Once a month the man from next door would mow our backyard. He liked mowing, he said. He would always do it early on a Saturday morning. I didn’t mind because I was always up. My brother and I would get up early to watch the cartoons. They finished at 9 AM , so if you didn’t get up, you missed them. After the cartoons came hours and hours of sports shows.
    Mum would stay in bed and she wouldn’t get up even though the sound of the lawn mower was very loud and would have woken her.
    Bo stood by the back door and watched the man mow.
    â€œIsn’t it great?” he said to me when I came outside. I nodded but I didn’t know why. I didn’t know what was great. When the man finished and left our yard, Bo ran down the concrete steps and got down on the grass. He rolled around, over and over, and when he stopped rolling he lay on his belly in the middle of the lawn.
    My brother came out to see what was happening and we walked down the steps and stood at the edge of the grass together. He was already sniffing and my eyes had started to itch with all the bits of grass in the air. Bo put his face to the earth, breathed in deep, and he stayed like that for ages. When he looked up, the grass had made imprints on his face and he said, “I love grass!” It made us laugh, we didn’t know why. “I love it,” he said again and he rolled over and got up. His white T-shirt was all stained by the freshly cut grass.
    â€œI feel like I haven’t smelt grass since I was a boy.”
    â€œI get hay fever,” my brother said and he rubbed his eyes, then started to sneeze. Bo took us inside and he washed my brother’s face with a hot washcloth.
    â€œDo you think your T-shirt is wrecked?” my brother asked when he had stopped sneezing. “Mum says grass doesn’t come out.”
    Bo looked down at his stained T-shirt, brown with dirt and green with grass.
    â€œIt’s perfect,” he said. “My T-shirt is perfect.”

A BOX OF CHEWING GUM
    I t was something special to go on Bo’s ship. It was something I had imagined, looking at all the ships that were at the wharf and thinking that I’d love to see what it was like inside. Sometimes there were open days for navy ships, but they were not like Nella . They were gray and clean and organized. Compartmentalized.
    Mum took us down to the wharf on a Sunday. It was the day before Bo was leaving again for Antarctica. For Casey.
    Nella Dan was waiting for us when we got there, all bright and warm. Inside, she was bigger than you expected. There were stairs and many floors and cabins and corridors and outside decks and undercover decks and showers and bathrooms and places to eat and places to sit, and all of them felt cozy and comforting and lived-in and loved. It was like she came from some other time and some other place. A place much better than here.
    Bo made us lunch and we sat with the crew at their table. They put cushions on our chairs so we could reach. And we were like tiny people, like fairies, and everything was giant. The glasses of milk and the liter bottles of beer and the slices of dark bread and cheese. A man called Soren, who had long yellow hair, drank a whole liter of milk right out of the carton and then he burped loudly and laughed. It made my brother laugh too. He really laughed.
    Later, when we had finished lunch, Soren lifted my brother up highoff the ground so that he could see all the boxes of duty-free candies and chocolates that were stacked on top of a tall storage cupboard. Soren told him to choose whatever he liked in a thick accent that was deep and rolling and happy. I saw my brother’s hands grab an orange box. I saw his eyes, how big they were. When Soren put him back down on the ground, my brother looked up at