Cry of the Children Read Online Free PDF Page A

for the ride. Lucy couldn’t understand how he did that without losing his balance and falling off and being crushed. She was afraid for him, until he disappeared from her sight and her mind, and she clung again to the bike and her own safety, whilst Matt pressed himself hard against the seat and her, like a protective shell on a tortoise.
    By the time the music slowed and the ride came to a halt, she had become accustomed enough to the movement to be excited as well as frightened. She didn’t nod her head at Matt, but she managed a sickly smile when he said, ‘That was good, wasn’t it? You’re a big girl, now that you’ve been on the motorbikes!’
    Lucy was a little breathless, but she was pleased that she had been on the motorbike and the big ride, now that it was over. Matt took her over to the shooting stall and said that he’d try to win a prize for her. She had to hold on to his trousers whilst he put both hands on the rifle and peered though the sight, then shot at the little moving targets ahead of him. He won her a little rag doll with a Chinese-looking round face and delivered it proudly into her two uplifted hands. Lucy would have liked the great big teddy bear in the middle of the prizes, but Matt said no one won that and it was only there to make people pay to try for it. He said the guns weren’t really very good and the sights on them weren’t true.
    They went over to one of the smaller rides, which was quiet now that most of the younger children had left the fair and gone home to bed. It had an old-fashioned bus on it with a horn you could honk. She preferred it to Thomas the Tank Engine, because the bus was very like the one Lucy remembered from one of her favourite books when she had been small. She hadn’t gone on this ride earlier, because the bus had always stopped opposite other children rather than her and they’d been on to it and honking its horn before Lucy could get there.
    Now there weren’t as many children here. And this time when the ride was over and the roundabout slowed, the bus came to a halt right opposite Matt and Lucy. She looked up at him automatically and he smiled down at her. ‘All right,’ he said. ‘If you still want to go in that old bus, even after you’ve been on the big rides, you can do. But this will be your last ride. It’s getting late and we don’t want your mum to be worried, do we? We must go home after this.’
    Lucy was in the bright blue bus before he had finished speaking. Matt smiled and waved at her as she waited for the ride to fill up and the man to take the fares. He watched her face concentrate as the ride began to move slowly and she grabbed the wheel and gave her first vigorous honk on the horn.
    Matt took the time to think over his relationship with Lucy’s mother. He wasn’t sure how deep he wanted to get in with Anthea Gibson – everyone said don’t touch anyone with kids. But she liked him and she was good in bed; that was surely a good start and it made his life more pleasant having a few creature comforts to look forward to these days.
    And Lucy was a nice kid, when you got to know her. She had lovely bright eyes and a nice smile. And she had that smooth, perfect skin that you only really got with girls of her age. And that lovely soft … but he mustn’t think about things like that. That way disaster lay. He directed his thoughts to the rounded flesh of the child’s buxom mother: that should surely be enough for any man.
    Lucy relaxed a little as the ride made its third circuit, enough to remember that she was with Matt. She waved to him as her bus swung swiftly past him. He watched her go past, twisting the wheel hard to her left, then pressing the horn hard and continuously. She got a long ride because there weren’t as many small customers around as there had been earlier in the day. Lucy waved the arm of the little rag doll she’d