Arcadia Read Online Free PDF Page B

people’s stuff, even if it was the same stuff. There were invisible divisions everywhere, like the straight black grid lines on the yellow paper. They’ve all blown away now. The world’s just what it is, without labels.
    The north end of Home is high ground like the hilltops on Briar, except that it’s not a hill but a whole plateau, a wide flat heath. Once he’s past the scrubby trees which protect the north fields from the wind he’s in a totally different landscape. Even in The Old Days it was empty and bleak up here, just dead-looking ankle-high heather in every direction. It’s brown instead of green, peaty soil and bristly stunted plants. Nobody ever comes this way (which is a good thing since he’s completely exposed). You can’t grow anything to eat here, there’s no wood to cut for burning. Ol can’t come up here because it’s high enough that you can see the open sea. (Couldn’t.) All that’s here is the ruins of the Castle, but nobody except Rory’s interested in them.
    The ruins look particularly tragic this afternoon. Everyone calls it a Castle but it couldn’t have looked anything like the ones in the comics even before it was ruined. The doorways are tiny. Viola says people were smaller long ago, when it was built. He usually stops to have a little poke around its roofless stone rooms, but not today. The Meeting’s guaranteed to take a pretty long time—he knows how much the women love talking—but still, he’s absolutely got to be back at Parson’s before his mother. He can’t dawdle.
    The paths up here are like channels cut in the heather. Nothing grows on them except patches of some moss that’s nearly black. There are still a few tiny flowers among the scrub. He strips off a small handful and holds them in his fist.
    Past the Castle you suddenly become much more aware of the sea. The top of Briar curves away on one side and the Channel becomes open water. Now there’s surf below, the relentless swell driving directly against the islands. Eastwards, on the opposite side to Briar, Martin’s a long scar across the horizon still as black as the moss even though the fire was more than a year ago. Between Martin and Home lies a wild smattering of shoals and sandbars and grass-tufted outcrops, all shadowed by the rocky fists of the northern islands where the water’s always in a fury. As the promontory of Home narrows around him, the sound he thought was the wind turns step by step into the constant grinding of the sea. The air’s full of noise and movement, spinning gulls, the flavor of salt. He might as well be on a different island from his mother and Laurel and Pink and everyone else. It’s a sea-place here at the north end of Home, a bird- or seal-place, not a place for people.
    The tide’s about halfway. He clambers down the last slope over stone and tough grass until he’s overlooking a small cove of shelving rocks. He’s learnt the best way across them by now, hopping from peak to slab while the sea slithers and hisses through gaps below. Once he’s out as far as he can safely go he pulls his clenched fist from his pocket, checks the breeze, and tosses the handful of minuscule flowers into the water.
    â€œI’m here,” he shouts. He doesn’t know whether it makes any difference but he always does it anyway. He’s well hidden down in the cove, and even if someone else was walking around the north end, which no one ever is, they’d never hear a thing over the racket of the gulls and the waves.
    For that matter he doesn’t know whether the flowers (or it might be an interestingly patterned stone, or an apple core, or, if he’s daring, a nail or something else useful) help either. People do this kind of thing a lot anyway. Esme plaited a doll out of straw and hung it from a tree when they were planting in the spring; it was gone the next day. Laurel says