Cryers Hill Read Online Free PDF

particular phrase cropped up regularly in Gor's conversation. Whatever his mother had done with her face it would have likely been fleeting, but his dad had learned to read the smallest messages in faces, especially his wife's.
    'What do you know about Einstein, Cath?'
    It was frustrating, the silence. Sean too wanted to know about Einstein. He needed to know whether he was connected to Enoch, whether the clues to this whole exchange lay in these two names. Still nothing.
    'I'm waiting, Cath.'
    Sean waited too. This was women all over. His dad had explained it more than once. They carried on their backs an invisible shell, he said. From time to time, usually without warning, a woman retreats inside her shell and will not come out. Sean had been amazed by this, though even in his stunned consideration of it, he realised he could recall examples and saw with clarity that it was true. Why would they want to do that? His dad seemed none the wiser on this. Because they can, was all he came up with. He said it sadly, without conviction, and Sean thought of witches and princes.
    'You don't know a bloody thing about Einstein!'
    Sean thought he couldn't blame his father for being upset. She had introduced this other person, called him by a funny name, and now refused to reveal who this other person was.
    'I asked a simple question, Cath, a simple question.'
    Silence. His mother had entered her shell. Neither he nor his father could winkle her out now. Bobbing in the silence were Chinese symbols, a dead girl, Bond villains, Miss Day, a foreigner and someone called Enoch. Sean flattened another wallpaper bubble with his teeth. His father burped. It had impact where the words had none. It was a sound that said, That's the end of it, like a bell.
    Sean thought, what if the sun burns out? What if I become possessed by an evil spirit? What if an alien ship lands? And, what if I accidentally eat poison? Sean thought whatifs a lot. There were a lot of whatifs to think about. If you tried for the rest of your life you wouldn't get through all the whatifs that could be. These questions pressed down on Sean whether he liked it or not. He thought maybe this was why mad people were mad. This could mean that madness was just around the corner. What if people turned mad and didn't know it? What if half the world were, in fact, mad? What if these questions and all the others spun you about until you were rotating inside a vortex of whatifs? What then?

Six
    S INCE BOYHOOD WALTER Brown had tried to imagine the girl who would one day be his own. He tried to conjure her from the hawthorn hedge and stile. He daydreamed and night-dreamed her. Eventually he gave her gold hair and called her Cissie. At night he felt the whisper of her breath and the arch of her back. He decided she would be happy as Larry and love him all the time. He upset himself over how she would suffer at his funeral. He pictured her clinging and crying by his grave, while the mourners shook their heads at the pity of it all.
    He thought about her when the rain was coming down and when the wind pushed him home, through the fields, from school. He thought about her when the heat of the coals in the teatime fire made his eyes smart and when the sun stroked down his back in the morning. Sometimes he wondered if thinking about her this much might bring her, just from the force of wanting and the pull of his imaginings.
    So he waited for her but she didn't come. While he waited for the Cissie he'd made up in his head, he practised talking to live girls. He tried Mary Hatt.
    'I saw a man get his head stove in once.'
    These were the first words Mary Hatt spoke to Walter Brown in the yard at Cryers Hill village school. Walter nodded politely and tried not to look at her face for fear this would release a whole chain of events. In contrast to her elder sister, the graceful Isabel, Mary Hatt carried herself carelessly and released her thoughts directly from her mouth, without censorship or