Arcadia Read Online Free PDF Page A

blow.
    â€œNo one made it. No one’s ever come back. Don’t you understand they’d have come back if they could? People only ever leave. They drowned like everyone else.”
    He stares at his feet, eyes stinging. After a bit she says, “Rory, Rory,” and tries to hug him, but he’s too busy fighting off tears. Then she starts talking about what a good sailor Scarlet was, and how Jake and Dad would have hid belowdecks while she steered them safely to the Mainland. She’s forgotten that this version of the story was his idea in the first place. He got it from a comic story about a Greek hero who tied himself to a mast to listen to the Sirens while everyone else plugged their ears and rowed past. It’s too late for the lie now, there’s no comfort in it. As they come past the Club and out by the Beach he looks up the narrowest part of the Channel to the big rock off the shore of Briar, where the gibbet is. He imagines a glistening white body dangling there, turning back and forth in the wind, and feels sick at heart.
    Â Â *  *  *  
    Back at Parson’s his mother gets the stove lit using the electric clicker and makes scrambled eggs with bits of spring onions and some flakes of fish scraped from yesterday’s bones. They eat slowly, chewing for a long time. She watches him carefully, as if she’s gone back to checking that he chews each mouthful at least ten times, though he learned to do that ages ago. Normally when they’re having breakfast they talk about the things that need doing that day and who’s going to end up doing what. This morning she doesn’t say a word. Normally when they’re finished they stand up and she stretches and then he does the cleaning and tidying up while she gets their clothes ready to go over to the Abbey for the Meeting. This morning the plates stay dirty on the table and she’s staring into space.
    Finally he asks, “Isn’t there going to be the Meeting today?”
    â€œI’ll go in a bit,” she says, vaguely. She’s obviously thinking about something else.
    â€œI could go back to Briar,” he says. The Meeting’s when they decide (or in fact Kate and Fi decide) who’s going to have which job that day. If they’re going to miss it he’ll have to think of something to do on his own. Everyone has to do something. “There’s lots of good berries over there still.”
    She slams her hand over his wrist so hard it makes him jump.
    â€œWhat are you talking about?” she says. “I thought you understood.”
    He bites his lip.
    â€œListen to me,” she says, which is stupid, because it’s not like he has any choice. “You’re not to go to Briar on your own. Ever. Or over the east side. Not anymore.”
    â€œBut—”
    â€œNever! Never, ever. Understand?” She shakes his wrist. “Understand?”
    He mumbles yes because he has to. But he knows she’s feeling something he can’t feel, her own special anger and despair, and he doesn’t think he’ll ever understand that. Maybe when he’s grown up.

3
    F or the next couple of days it’s as if no one’s looking at anyone else properly. He remembers what it was like when he was smaller and What Happened had just started happening, and everywhere you looked there was someone missing and someone else crying or shouting or fighting, and he had the dreadful realization that the adults were no less helpless and bewildered than the children. He remembers creeping in and out of their house, passing his mother sitting like a zombie at the kitchen table, wanting to ask her what was happening but knowing if he did she’d go hysterical. There’s a little bit of that feeling now.
    He’s afraid of running into Molly. Everyone talks about her in hushed voices, as though if they say her name too loud she’ll break. Even Laurel’s on edge.